McCarthyism
Based on Wikipedia: McCarthyism
On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy walked into a Republican Women's Club meeting in Wheeling, West Virginia, and brandished a piece of paper. He claimed it contained the names of 205 known communists working in the State Department—shaping American foreign policy while secretly loyal to the Soviet Union. The speech ignited a media firestorm and launched McCarthy into the national spotlight. Within weeks, a political cartoonist named Herbert Herblock coined a new term for what was happening: McCarthyism.
But here's the thing: the phenomenon we call McCarthyism didn't actually start with McCarthy.
The campaign to root out communists and communist sympathizers from American institutions had been building for years before that Wheeling speech. President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9835 in March 1947—three years before McCarthy's famous speech—requiring loyalty screenings for all federal employees. The FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, had been compiling lists of suspected subversives since 1942. The House Un-American Activities Committee, known as HUAC, had been investigating alleged communist infiltration since the 1930s.
Some historians argue we should stop calling it McCarthyism altogether. Ellen Schrecker has suggested "Hooverism" might be more accurate, since FBI director J. Edgar Hoover orchestrated much of the surveillance and persecution apparatus. McCarthy was the most visible face of the Second Red Scare, but he was far from its architect.
The Perfect Storm
To understand how America descended into this period of political repression, you need to understand the cascade of events that made it possible.
The Cold War began almost the moment World War Two ended. As the Soviet Union installed communist puppet governments across Central and Eastern Europe, American anxieties about communist expansion intensified. In March 1947, President Truman announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine: the United States would actively oppose Soviet geopolitical expansion worldwide.
Then came 1949, a watershed year for American fears about communism.
First, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb—years earlier than most American analysts had predicted. The U.S. nuclear monopoly was over. Second, Mao Zedong's communist forces won the Chinese Civil War, taking control of the world's most populous nation despite massive American financial support for their opponents. Two of the most powerful nations on earth were now communist, and both had the potential to develop nuclear arsenals.
In January 1950, just weeks before McCarthy's Wheeling speech, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. Hiss had been a high-level State Department official, and the perjury conviction stemmed from his denial of espionage charges. The statute of limitations had run out on the actual espionage, but the implication was clear: he'd been spying for the Soviets.
Around the same time, Klaus Fuchs confessed in Britain to passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project during the war. Then Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested on similar charges. They would be executed in 1953.
When the Korean War erupted in June 1950, pitting American and United Nations forces against communist North Korea and China, it seemed to confirm every fear: communism was spreading, aggressively and violently, and the threat of nuclear war loomed over everything.
What McCarthyism Actually Looked Like
The term "McCarthyism" has come to mean reckless, unsubstantiated accusations of disloyalty—guilt by association, presumed treason based on flimsy evidence, character assassination masquerading as patriotism. But in its historical context, it described a vast machinery of persecution that destroyed thousands of lives.
The primary targets were government employees, entertainment industry figures, academics, left-wing politicians, and labor union activists. The methods varied, but the pattern was consistent: suspicion based on questionable evidence, followed by devastating professional and personal consequences.
Federal employees faced loyalty review boards. By 1958, an estimated one in five American workers was required to pass some sort of loyalty review. The standard wasn't proof of wrongdoing—it was "reasonable grounds for belief that the person involved is disloyal." That vague standard meant almost anything could trigger dismissal: membership in the wrong organization, attendance at a suspect meeting, even shopping at the Washington Bookshop Association, a left-leaning group that offered literature lectures and book discounts.
Here's how it worked in practice: The Department of Justice maintained a list of "subversive" organizations. At its peak, the list included 154 groups, 110 of them labeled communist. Membership in any listed organization raised questions about your loyalty. But here's the nightmare: in most cases, you weren't allowed to know who accused you or what specific evidence they had. FBI director Hoover insisted on keeping informants' identities secret, so people lost their jobs based on anonymous accusations they couldn't challenge.
If you lost your job due to an unfavorable loyalty review, finding new employment became nearly impossible. As the chairman of Truman's Loyalty Review Board put it: "A man is ruined everywhere and forever. No responsible employer would be likely to take a chance in giving him a job."
The FBI's Secret War
J. Edgar Hoover was the engine driving much of this. He designed Truman's loyalty security program, and FBI agents conducted the background investigations. To handle the workload, the bureau nearly doubled in size, growing from 3,559 agents in 1946 to 7,029 in 1952.
But Hoover's FBI went far beyond official loyalty reviews. From 1951 to 1955, the bureau ran a secret "Responsibilities Program" that distributed anonymous documents—called "blind memoranda"—containing evidence from FBI files about teachers, lawyers, and others with alleged communist affiliations. People named in these secret documents were often fired without any formal process or right to defend themselves.
The FBI also broke the law routinely: burglaries to photograph documents, opening mail, illegal wiretaps. All in the name of national security.
The National Lawyers Guild, one of the few legal organizations willing to defend people accused of communist ties, became a particular target. Hoover viewed any lawyer willing to defend accused communists as suspect by association.
HUAC and the Entertainment Industry
While federal employees faced loyalty boards and FBI investigations, the entertainment industry faced the House Un-American Activities Committee.
HUAC had been around since the 1930s, but it became particularly aggressive in the late 1940s and early 1950s, hauling screenwriters, directors, and actors before Congress to testify about their political beliefs and associations. The question wasn't usually whether you'd committed a crime—it was whether you'd ever attended a communist meeting, signed a petition for a left-wing cause, or associated with people who had.
If you refused to answer, citing your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, you were often blacklisted—barred from working in your profession. The Hollywood blacklist destroyed careers, forcing talented writers to work under pseudonyms or leave the industry entirely.
And here's the crucial thing: most of these reprisals were later found to be unjust. Trial verdicts were overturned. Laws were struck down as unconstitutional. Dismissals were ruled illegal. But by then, lives had been ruined.
The Deeper Roots
McCarthyism didn't emerge from nowhere. Its roots stretched back to the First Red Scare after World War One, when fears of anarchists and labor radicalism led to similar crackdowns. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, conservative politicians routinely labeled progressive reforms—child labor laws, women's suffrage, New Deal programs—as "communist plots."
The Communist Party of the United States grew significantly during the Great Depression, peaking at about 75,000 members in 1940-41. For many Americans struggling through economic catastrophe, communism offered an alternative to capitalism's failures. The party was also effective at organizing labor unions and was among the earliest opponents of fascism.
During World War Two, when the United States and Soviet Union were allies against Nazi Germany, anti-communist sentiment was largely muted. But the wartime alliance was always uneasy, and it collapsed almost immediately after the war ended.
What's striking is how politicians weaponized vague fears about "communist influence" without specifying actual crimes or espionage. An economist named Leland Olds, who chaired the Federal Power Commission, failed to win renomination because of suspected communist sympathies years earlier—not because anyone proved he'd done anything wrong, but because the suspicion alone was enough.
McCarthy's Rise and Fall
Joseph McCarthy was a relatively obscure first-term senator from Wisconsin when he gave that Wheeling speech in February 1950. But the media attention it generated transformed him overnight into one of the most recognized politicians in America.
The number on that list he waved around kept changing—sometimes 205, sometimes 57, sometimes other figures. He never actually produced the list or proved that the people on it were communists. But the specifics didn't matter. The accusation was enough to generate headlines and keep him in the spotlight.
For the next four years, McCarthy's investigations and accusations dominated American politics. He chaired the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and used it as a platform to attack the State Department, the Army, and anyone else he deemed insufficiently anti-communist. His tactics were reckless: guilt by association, innuendo, claims based on flimsy or fabricated evidence.
But McCarthy's influence peaked in 1954, when he went after the U.S. Army, claiming it was riddled with communists. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised, and millions of Americans watched McCarthy's bullying tactics on display. When he attacked a young lawyer who worked for the Army's counsel, Joseph Welch delivered what became the defining rebuke: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
Public opinion turned. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute." He remained in the Senate but lost his power and influence. He died in 1957, at age 48, his reputation in ruins.
The End of an Era
The Supreme Court played a crucial role in ending the McCarthy era. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court issued a series of rulings in the mid to late 1950s that overturned key laws and legislative directives that had enabled the worst excesses. These decisions restored civil and political rights that had been trampled in the name of national security.
But the damage lingered. Careers remained destroyed. People who'd been blacklisted or fired struggled to rebuild their lives. The culture of fear and suspicion didn't vanish overnight.
What We Know Now
After the Cold War ended, Soviet archives were opened, and documents revealed that yes, there had been substantial Soviet espionage in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Some of the fears weren't entirely unfounded.
But—and this is crucial—most of the people McCarthy and others accused were never properly identified as actual Soviet agents. The persecution caught far more innocent people than guilty ones. The machinery of McCarthyism was indiscriminate, destroying lives based on associations, beliefs, and suspicions rather than actual evidence of espionage or wrongdoing.
The Legacy
Today, "McCarthyism" describes any political climate where reckless accusations of disloyalty and extremism are used to destroy opponents—where innuendo replaces evidence, where association equals guilt, where questioning someone's patriotism substitutes for debating their ideas.
It's a reminder of how quickly fear can erode civil liberties and due process. How national security concerns can be weaponized for political gain. How institutions meant to protect us—the FBI, congressional committees, loyalty review boards—can become instruments of oppression when accountability and restraint fail.
The historian Ellen Schrecker argues that the real damage of McCarthyism wasn't just the individual lives destroyed—it was the broader chilling effect on American political discourse. People learned to self-censor, to avoid controversial associations, to keep their heads down. The range of acceptable political debate narrowed. Dissent became dangerous.
Understanding McCarthyism means understanding not just what Joseph McCarthy did, but how a democratic society can descend into political persecution when fear overwhelms reason, when accusations replace evidence, and when the machinery of government turns against its own citizens in the name of protecting them.