Mccarthyism
Mccarthyism
The term McCarthyism refers to an accusatory campaign based on unfair allegations, fear tactics, innuendo, and sensationalized threats of guilt by association. McCarthyism was coined by political cartoonist Herbert Block (1909–2001) in a March 29, 1950, Washington Post cartoon lampooning the anticommunist campaigns of Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1908–1957), a Republican from Wisconsin, in the 1950s. McCarthy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946 and rose to national prominence after newspapers reported on a speech he made in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, in which he claimed to have a list of 205 State Department employees who were members of the Communist Party. McCarthy’s list later shrunk to eighty-one, then fifty-seven, but McCarthy’s facts mattered little to the press or his public.
When McCarthy became the chair of the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations in 1952, he used this position to investigate alleged Communists. In 1953 the committee identified “subversive” books held at American embassy libraries around the world. Books by authors such as Owen Lattimore (1900–1989), Lillian Hellman (1905–1984), Langston Hughes (1902–1967), and Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) were removed from libraries because of allegations that the authors were either fellow travelers or Communists. In late 1953 McCarthy investigated the U.S. Army after an army dentist was promoted despite his refusal to answer questions on a federal loyalty oath. McCarthy’s inquiries soon led to investigations of a number of army officers.
Journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) broadcast a critical analysis of Senator McCarthy’s tactics in March 1954 on the CBS program See It Now. This broadcast brought increased public scrutiny of McCarthy. In April 1954 the Senate began the Army-McCarthy hearings, investigating McCarthy’s claims that the army was promoting Communists in its ranks. The hearings were nationally televised, allowing the nation to witness McCarthy’s bullying and fabricating of evidence. On June 9, 1954, McCarthy’s rapid descent began after a televised hearing showed army special council Joseph Welch (1890–1960) rebuffing McCarthy for his scurrilous tactics. Welch berated McCarthy before the cameras for his reckless bullying, rhetorically asking, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
The Senate censured McCarthy on December 2, 1954, by a vote of seventy-six to twenty-two. McCarthy remained in the Senate, but his power was greatly diminished. He died of sclerosis of the liver in 1957. For all his bluster and claims to hold secret evidence of American Communism, McCarthy never identified a single Communist spy.
The social impacts of McCarthyism were significant. Some victims of McCarthyism lost jobs, were blacklisted, were alienated from friends and associates, or committed suicide. McCarthyism generated a climate of self-censorship. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), members of Congress, intellectuals, celebrities, and everyday citizens muted criticisms of McCarthy out of fear of being called procommunist (Schrecker 1998).
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had a symbiotic relationship with Senator McCarthy. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) had conducted free-ranging investigations of the American political Left since the 1930s, and the FBI secretly and illegally provided Senator McCarthy with records and names of individuals.
Functionally, McCarthyism deadened what might have been a critical activist edge in American social science as those who fought for racial or economic justice or who studied social stratification were routinely interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) or subjected to FBI surveillance and harassment (Harris 1980; Keen 2004; Price 2004). Proponents of McCarthyism were not simply interested in exposing and destroying Communists. McCarthyism’s outcomes were much broader and included attacking labor union leaders, as well as discrediting a wide range of social activists working for gender, racial, and economic equality.
Loyalty hearings made examples out of public figures associated with progressive causes. In 1952 playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005) began work on his play The Crucible, set during the 1692 Salem witch trials. The Crucible, which opened in New York in 1953, used the past to examine the 1950s climate of fear, accusations by informers, guilt by association, and the right of communities to bring moral judgments.
McCarthyism’s mechanisms of social control extend beyond the mid-twentieth century’s “Red Scare.” The use of fear, guilt by association, vague accusations, and claims that dissent is dangerously unpatriotic to generate silence and compliance is a recurrent instrument of social control employed in various societies before and since the 1950s (Garfinkel 1956).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Garfinkel, Harold. 1956. Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies. American Journal of Sociology 61 (1): 420–424.
Harris, Benjamin. 1980. The FBI’s Files on APA and SPSSI. American Psychologist 35: 1141–1144.
Keen, Mike. 2004. Stalking Sociologists: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Miller, Arthur. 1953. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts. New York: Viking.
Price, David H. 2004. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Schrecker, Ellen. 1998. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. New York: Little, Brown.
David H. Price