McCarthy's Wheeling Speech

McCarthy's Wheeling Speech launched Joseph McCarthy's rise from an obscure, unpopular senator to a nationally prominent accuser of alleged Communist infiltration in government. Its significance lay not in substantiated evidence—the book says he produced none—but in how a sensational charge, repeated and reshaped for different audiences, captured public attention amid a growing climate of fear.

Background and Preparation

By January, McCarthy, Wisconsin's forty-one-year-old junior senator, was struggling to find an issue that could lift him out of obscurity. He was nearly friendless in the Senate and had recently been rated its worst member in a poll of Washington correspondents. Over dinner at the Colony Restaurant, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University suggested that McCarthy sound an alarm about Communist infiltration of the government. McCarthy had already made some loud but little-noticed accusations of subversion; the suggestion gave him a subject he could turn into a much larger political claim.

The Speech and Its Claims

A month later, in a Lincoln's Birthday speech in West Virginia, McCarthy waved a piece of paper and claimed it contained the names of 205 people in the United States Department of State whom he called known Communists. The speech initially attracted little notice. In subsequent appearances in Salt Lake City and Reno, he made essentially the same charge but reduced the number to fifty-seven and described those named as card-carrying Communists. The changing figure did not prevent the accusation from gaining traction: the later claims made headlines across the country.

Amplification and Consequences

Back in the Senate, McCarthy spoke for five hours and said he had penetrated what he called Truman's iron curtain of secrecy, producing a further figure of eighty-one names. The book characterizes his allegations as wild and unsupported: he supplied neither names nor new evidence. Yet the lack of substantiation did not stop the claims from spreading. Press coverage often gave the most sensational allegations the largest headlines, and some Americans came to suspect that, even if McCarthy was wrong in particular details, he might have uncovered something real.

The speech thus marked the beginning of a political method built around escalating allegations and public alarm. McCarthy had been criticized as desperate and reckless, and his investigation was described as a burlesque of legitimate loyalty checks. But criticism did little to restrain him. In a country already gripped by fear, his accusations supplied a vivid target and helped turn that fear into a national political force.