Joseph McCarthy

Joe McCarthy, (Joseph R. McCarthy) 1908-1957, Republican United States Senator from Wisconsin, 1946-57, dominated the antiCommunist movement in the U.S., 1950-54, until his career was ruined by censure by the Senate. "McCarthyism" is the aggressive exposure of Communists influences in America and the people who protect them, with scant regard for due process.

Early career

Joseph McCarthy was born to a poor Irish Catholic farm family in Appleton, Wisconsin. A hyperactive, extroverted youth, he dropped out of school after eighth grade to start his own poultry business. After the chickens all died, he enrolled in the local public high school. Thanks to enormous energy and a retentive mind, he finished his coursework in less than a year at age 20. After two undergraduate years at Marquette University, a leading Jesuit school in Milwaukee, McCarthy entered Marquette Law School, acquiring the rudiments of the profession as he knit together a statewide network among Irish and German Catholics. McCarthy was a practicing Catholic his entire life, but rarely referred to religion or ethnicity in his speeches. He actively supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Young Democrats, but did not join Irish organizations. Although defeated in his 1936 race for district attorney, McCarthy displayed remarkable campaign abilities and an astonishing memory for faces. He had the energy and determination to meet every voter in person, exuding charm and a concern for the voter as an individual. The same tactics paid off in 1939, when he was successful in a nonpartisan contest for a regional judgeship. In 1942 McCarthy, volunteered for the Marines (as a judge he was draft exempt), becoming an intelligence officer in an aviation unit heavily engaged in combat in the South Pacific. Although assigned a desk job McCarthy flew numerous combat missions as a tail gunner—he exaggerated the number to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross.

Elected to Senate, 1946

McCarthy had his name entered in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in 1944, opposing a well-entrenched incumbent, Alexander Wiley. The absentee war hero ran a strong second, making a name for himself statewide. Why McCarthy suddenly changed parties was never explained, but prospects for ambitious Wisconsin politicians were dim inside the poorly organized Democratic party, for most New Dealers supported the state’s Progressive party. During the war, however, that party collapsed, torn apart between its New Deal domestic liberalism, and its intensely isolationist opposition to Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Increasingly out of touch with Wisconsin, its leader Robert LaFollette Jr looked to his family’s past glories and made the blunder of trying for reelection to the Senate in 1946 as a Republican. “Tail Gunner Joe,” endlessly crisscrossing the state while his opponent stayed in Washington, offered an alternative in the Republican primary to old guard Republicans who had opposed the Lafollettes for a half century. McCarthy brilliantly captured the frustrations citizens felt about massive strikes, unstable economy, price controls, severe shortages of housing and meat, and the growing threat of from the far left in the CIO. He nipped LaFollette in the primary. The slogan “Had Enough?—Vote Republican” gave the Republicans a landslide all across the North, electing a new junior senator from Wisconsin.

Communist Issue

In Washington, McCarthy was a mainstream conservative in domestic policy, and, like many veterans, was an internationalist in foreign affairs, supporting the Marshall Plan and NATO. His speeches rarely mentioned domestic Communism or flaming issues like the Alger Hiss espionage case, but that suddenly changed in early 1950 when his vivid anti-Communist rhetoric drew national attention. "The issue between the Republicans and Democrats is clearly drawn. It has been deliberately drawn by those who have been in charge of twenty years of treason.” Alleging there were many card-carrying Communists in Harry S. Truman’s State Department, McCarthy forced a Senate investigation led by Millard Tydings, Democrat of Maryland. McCarthy named numerous suspect diplomats but failed to convince the three Democrats on the panel; they concluded his allegations were “a fraud and a hoax,” while the two Republicans dissented. McCarthy retaliated by campaigning against Tydings, who was defeated for reelection in November, 1950. What the senator himself called McCarthyism was a factor in key races across the country; all his candidates won and his stock soared. A few weeks later American forces were crushed by the Chinese in Korea, and in spring 1951 Truman tried to shift the blame by firing General Douglas MacArthur.

Political dominance

McCarthy now became the dominant figure in American politics, with strong support among both Republicans and Catholic Democrats, as he alleged that Truman’s top people had betrayed America. He singled out Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense George Marshall. Liberals were aghast; Truman had picked General Marshall to head the State and Defense departments precisely because he thought the elderly statesman would always be above criticism, no matter that China turned from a staunch ally to a bitter enemy on his watch. McCarthy’s blistering attacks on Marshall as “part of a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man” fueled the belief he was a wild-man, a pathological liar who overstepped the bounds of political discourse.

With Dwight D. Eisenhower crusading against “Korea, Communism and Corruption” in 1952, Republican victory was assured. As a senior member of the majority party McCarthy for the first time became a committee chairman, with control of staffing and agenda. He used his Government Operations Committee to open highly publicized hearings in 1953-54 alleging disloyalty in the State Department, the CIA, the US Information Agency, and finally the Army. His furious attacks on the Army led to the televised “Army-McCarthy” hearings in spring, 1954, which exposed his bullying tactics to a national audience. As McCarthy’s poll rating plunged, his enemies finally pulled together to introduce a censure resolution focused on McCarthy’s contempt for the federal government, and especially for his fellow senators.

McCarthy’s charges that over-educated liberals tolerated Communism at home and abroad had baffled the liberals. He alleged that they had corruptly sold out the national interest to protect their upper class privileges, and were so idealistic about world affairs that they radically underestimated the threat posed by Stalin, his spies, and the worldwide Communist movement. Instead of refuting the allegations, Liberals tried one of two approaches. Some became intensely anti-Communist and claimed they were more effective than McCarthy and the Republicans in eliminating Communism in the unions and Democratic party, and in containing the Stalinist menace in Europe. The other approach was to counterattack, to charge that “McCarthyism” never found a single spy but hurt innocent people in hunting for nonexistent witches; thus it represented an evil betrayal of American values. In an appeal to upscale conservatives and liberal intellectuals, critics ignored the Communist infiltration of labor unions and liberal causes and focused on stereotyping anticommunists as ill-mannered ignorant troglodytes, oblivious to American traditions of free speech and free association. McCarthy’s exaggerations and false charges encouraged opponents to stress the second approach, but it escalated the controversy to a pitch of hatreds and fears unprecedented since the days of reconstruction. McCarthy’s superb sense of timing and his media instincts kept his partisan attacks on the front page every day; his willingness to do battle in the hustings with Democratic opponents across the country strengthened his base in the Republican party. His religion and ethnicity, refreshed with highly visible friendships with leading Irish Catholics, especially the Kennedy family, bolstered his standing among Democrats. According to Gallup, McCarthy’s popularity crested in January 1954, when he was endorsed by all voters 50-29 (with 21 having no opinion). His core support came from Republicans and Catholics who had not attended college. McCarthy however failed to create any sort of grass roots organization. He had no organizational skills; he did not effectively use his talented staffers (such as Robert Kennedy). He was a loner who lurched from issue to issue, misled by the enormous media publicity into believing that a one-man crusade was possible in a an increasingly well-educated complex society honeycombed with local, regional and national organizations. By operating within the Republican party apparatus he lost the opportunity to create an independent grass roots political crusade in the style of Teddy Roosevelt, Huey Long, or Ross Perot. He never launched his own magazine or radio show or formed alliances with publishers who agreed with him. McCarthy’s strained relations with Senate colleagues created a trapdoor. It was sprung after many Republicans realized that he had shifted the attack away from the Democrats. What use was his slogan “20 Years of Treason” once Eisenhower was in office? McCarthy’s answer was “21 Years of Treason!” Eisenhower’s supporters could no longer tolerate such a loose cannon, and as McCarthy unwisely shifted his attacks to Eisenhower’s beloved Army, his cause was doomed. While many Americans distrusted Ivy League, striped pants diplomats, soldiers were held in high regard; McCarthy’s charges of subversion were flimsy (one Communist dentist had been automatically promoted); he sabotaged his own reputation by finagling favors for an aide who had been drafted. The televised hearings proved fatal to an ill-prepared bully. After the Democrats regained control of Congress in the 1954 the censure motion carried, 67-22. McCarthy’s appeal, so widespread yet superficial, evaporated overnight and the Senator faded into the shadows.

McCarthyism

McCarthy is permanently associated with "McCarthyism" -- he did not coin the term but he did use it, to mean an aggressive attack on Communists who had infiltrated America, and on the liberals who protected them, without regard for due process. Schrecker (1998) sees it as anti-Communist political repression of the early Cold War, and explores its mechanisms through, and what she considers the exaggerated public fears on which it depended. During the 1940s-1950s, McCarthyism took on a variety of forms with an array of agendas, interested parties, and modes of operating. Despite its widespread and popular character, it started with the federal government and was driven by a network of dedicated anti-Communist crusaders such as J. Edgar Hoover. McCarthyism's repression both responded to and helped create widespread fears of a significant threat to national security.

Media and popular culture

Historians have debated the dregree to which McCarthyism permeated the American mood and popular culture. Anti-Communist liberals at the time said it played to isolationism (especially strong in McCarthy's Wisconsin) ny diverting attention away from the real threat, Stalin's Soviet Union as an expernal power. The Left said that they had a First Amendment right to their beliefs and that McCarthyism had a chilling effect. Dussere (2003) shows that comic strip artist Walt Kelly in "Pogo" parodied McCarthyism and promoted leftist politics as old-fashioned American common sense, representing a time when concerns about art and politics with respect to popular culture were in the forefront. Hoover's FBI targeted retired film comedian Charlie Chaplin because of his status as a cultural icon and as part of its broader investigation of Hollywood. Some of Chaplin's films were considered "Communist propaganda," but because Chaplin was not a member of the Communist Party, he was not among those investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Nevertheless, he was vulnerable to protests by the American Legion and other patriotic groups because of both his sexual and political unorthodoxy. Although countersubversives succeeded in driving Chaplin out of the U.S., they failed to build a consensus that Chaplin was a threat to the nation. Chaplin's story testifies to both the power of the countersubversive campaign at mid-century and to some of its limitations.

Bibliography

• Buckley, William F. McCarthy and His Enemies (1954)
• Crosby, S.J., Donald F. God, Church and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950-1957 (1978). online edition
• Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective 1990 online edition
• Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate 1987 online edition
• Herman, Arthur Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator (2000).
• Latham, Earl Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy. (1969).
• O'Brien, Michael. McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin. (1981)
• Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (1983), standard biography
• Reeves, Thomas C. The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (1982), standard biography

McCarthyism

• Brinkley, Douglas, and Sam Tanenhaus. McCarthyism in America (2007)
• Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (1970) (Chap. 6 "The 1950's: McCarthyism") online edition
• Morgan, Ted. Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America. 2003. 685 pp.
• O'Reilly, Kenneth. Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace 1983
• Ottanelli, Fraser M. The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II 1991,
• Schrecker, Ellen. "McCarthyism: Political Repression and the Fear of Communism." Social Research 2004 71(4): 1041-1086. Issn: 0037-783x Fulltext: in Ebsco; summarizes her books on the subject
• Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America 1998
• Tanenhaus, Sam. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1998)
• Theoharis, Athan. Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years. 2002. 307 pp.
• Weinstein, Allen, and Vassiliev, Alexander. The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America: The Stalin Era 1999,

Media issues

• Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Media: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (2003)
• Dussere, Erik. "Subversion in the Swamp: Pogo and the Folk in the McCarthy Era." Journal of American Culture2003 26(1): 134-141. Issn: 1542-7331 Fulltext: in Ebsco
• Sbardellati, John and Shaw, Tony. "Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America." Pacific Historical Review 2003 72(4): 495-530. Issn: 0030-8684 Fulltext: University of California Journals; Jstor and Ebsco

Primary sources

• Joe McCarthy. Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy Delivered in the United States Senate, 1950-1951 U. S. Government Printing Office, 1953 online edition
• Joe McCarthy. McCarthyism: The Fight for America 1952 online edition
• Fried, ed. Albert. McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare: a Documentary History 1997 online edition