McCarthy, Joseph

McCarthy, Joseph (1908–1957), Republican senator from Wisconsin, notorious “Red‐hunter” during the early Cold War years.Born on a dairy farm near Appleton, Wisconsin, McCarthy quit school at age fourteen to raise chickens. He subsequently went bankrupt, returned to high school, crammed four years of work into two terms, and entered Marquette, a Jesuit college in Milwaukee. Earning a law degree in 1935, McCarthy established a small practice before winning a circuit judgeship by frantic campaigning and smearing the incumbent's good name.

At twenty‐nine, the youngest judge in Wisconsin, McCarthy raised eyebrows by providing “quickie divorces” to political supporters. The state supreme court also censured him for destroying crucial evidence in a price‐fixing case. Although judges were exempt from the draft, McCarthy joined the Marines in 1942 and spent World War II as an intelligence officer in the Pacific. He later claimed to have suffered wounds as a “tail‐gunner” when his plane crash‐landed under Japanese fire. In fact, his only war injury occurred during a troopship hazing incident, when he fell down a flight of stairs and broke his foot.

In 1946, McCarthy defeated three‐term incumbent Robert M. La Follette Jr., a member of Wisconsin's leading political family, in the Republican senatorial primary. The over‐confident La Follette barely bothered to campaign; McCarthy never stopped. A few months later, McCarthy buried his Democratic opponent, Howard McMurray, under a mountain of baseless allegations.

As a senator, McCarthy became known for his raucous, erratic behavior. Then, in February 1950, his political career in trouble and his reelection chances looking grim, he told a Republican gathering in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he held in his hand a list of 205 communists presently “working in the State Department.” The claim was preposterous; McCarthy knew nothing about communists in government or anywhere else. But his aim was publicity, and his timing was right. Americans were alarmed by Soviet aggression in Europe, China's recent fall to communist rule, Alger Hiss's conviction for perjury, and Russia's successful atomic‐bomb test. McCarthy provided a simple explanation for these disturbing events. The communists were “winning” the Cold War, he insisted, thanks to traitors within the U.S. government. The real enemy wasn't in Moscow; it was in Washington, D.C.

When communist North Korea invaded anticommunist South Korea in June 1950, McCarthy's message took on special force. In the November elections, Republicans gained five seats in the Senate and twenty‐eight in the House. As the 1952 presidential campaign approached, McCarthy grew bolder. He called Secretary of Defense George Marshall a traitor, mocked Secretary of State Dean Acheson as the “red Dean of Fashion,” and described President Harry S. Truman as a drunkard, adding, “The son‐of‐a‐bitch should be impeached.” During the campaign, McCarthy claimed, falsely, that the communist Daily Worker had endorsed the Democrat Adlai Stevenson for president. And he made the intentional slip “Alger I mean Adlai” in a nationally televised address. So long as his targets were Democrats, leading Republicans were generally supportive. Senator Robert Taft advised: “Keep talking and if one case doesn't work out, proceed with another.”

Not only did McCarthy easily win reelection in the Republican landslide of 1952, but four of the Democratic senators he campaigned against lost, including Millard Tydings of Maryland, chair of a Senate committee that in 1950 had labeled McCarthy's charges “a fraud and a hoax.” At his peak of influence, McCarthy became chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and its powerful Subcommittee on Investigations. Filling key staff positions with former agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and former prosecutors like Roy M. Cohn from New York, McCarthy set out to uncover “communist influence” in the federal government. His targets included the Voice of America, the Government Printing Office, and the Foreign Service. He even questioned the anticommunist credentials of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a member of his own party. McCarthy's hearings did not uncover any communists. They did, however, ruin numerous careers, undermine government morale, and make America look ridiculous in the eyes of the world.

McCarthy's downfall began with his investigation of “subversive activities” in the U.S. Army. The public got to see him for thirty‐six days in the televised Army‐McCarthy hearings during the Spring of 1954, and the cumulative impression was devastating, as the senator insulted witnesses, attacked fellow senators, and launched crude personal attacks against his critics. A 1954 TV documentary on McCarthy by the respected and influential CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow further eroded his influence. In November, the Senate censured McCarthy for bringing that body into “into dishonor and disrepute.” Many linked his censure to an easing of Cold War tensions. The Korean War was over, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin dead, and the radical right in disarray. His demagoguery no longer effective, McCarthy grew increasingly depressed. He died of alcoholism in 1957, utterly discredited, but the word “McCarthyism” lived on, a reminder of the worst times of the early Cold War.
See also Anticommunism; Hoover, J. Edgar; House Committee on Un‐American Activities; Republican Party; Rosenberg Case.

Bibliography

Edwin R. Bayley , Joe McCarthy and the Press, 1981.
David M. Oshinsky , A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, 1983.
Richard M. Fried , Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, 1990.

David M. Oshinsky