McCarthyism

McCarthyism was a political climate and style of accusation that flourished when fear of Communist infiltration met an appetite for dramatic claims and sustained press attention. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s allegations about government employees were repeatedly unsupported, yet they acquired influence before their central claims had been substantiated. The episode’s defining irony was that investigation and rebuttal could amplify the very accusations they sought to contain.

Fear and the search for an issue

The atmosphere was already charged with anxiety. As Washington confronted the prospect of more powerful nuclear weapons, fear seemed capable of catching fire from a small spark. In this setting, McCarthy, a relatively obscure Wisconsin senator with few allies in the Senate, found an issue that could command attention. At a dinner, Father Edmund A. Walsh suggested that he raise the alarm about Communist infiltration of the government. McCarthy had made earlier charges about subversion, but the suggestion gave those claims a political focus.

In a Lincoln’s Birthday speech in West Virginia, McCarthy displayed a piece of paper and claimed it listed 205 Communists in the State Department. The speech initially attracted little notice. In later appearances in Salt Lake City and Reno, he repeated the accusation with a different figure: fifty-seven alleged Communists, described as card-carrying. Those versions made headlines. Back in the Senate, he spoke for five hours and claimed to have penetrated a supposed wall of secrecy to identify eighty-one people. The figures changed, but the escalating scale of the performance kept the allegation in public view.

Accusation as political spectacle

The book stresses the gap between McCarthy’s claims and what he could demonstrate: he produced no names or new evidence to support his broad charges. Yet publicity gave his accusations a reach that their evidentiary basis did not warrant. Critical coverage described his campaign as reckless and damaging to the serious work of security checks, but criticism did not stop newspapers from printing his most sensational assertions. Some readers came to suspect that, even if McCarthy was wrong about particular details, he might have identified a real danger. The atmosphere of fear thus helped convert unsupported particulars into a broader impression of threat.

McCarthy also attacked President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. His charge that Truman was controlled by advisers who concealed information cast routine government deliberation as evidence of a cover-up. His personal assault on Acheson was followed by threatening correspondence serious enough that guards were posted at Acheson’s home around the clock. Republican responses were divided: some deplored McCarthy’s methods, while others supported his attacks. Robert Taft acknowledged encouraging him to keep pressing the issue, even if one particular accusation failed. The claims therefore served a partisan purpose as well as stirring anxiety about security.

The investigation that enlarged the stage

Senate Democrats responded by calling for an investigation. A special subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by Millard Tydings, held hearings in the Senate’s Caucus Room. The expectation was that public scrutiny would expose the weakness of McCarthy’s case. Instead, the hearings offered him sustained attention and a prominent platform. He portrayed the committee as more interested in identifying his informants than in assessing security risks. By the end of March, six weeks after his initial outburst in Wheeling, he still had not named a single Communist.

McCarthy then presented Owen Lattimore as a major espionage figure, alleging that he had once directed Alger Hiss and his network. The book identifies the accusation as fraudulent: Lattimore was neither a Communist nor an influential State Department official, and his service there had lasted only four months in 1946, as an adviser on a reparations mission in Japan. McCarthy promised an espionage case of historic importance and staked his credibility on it. The contrast between that promise and the limited facts about Lattimore exposes how the scale of an accusation could itself become a political spectacle.

Truman’s response and its limits

On March 30, during a stay at Key West, Truman held an uncommon press conference and publicly denounced McCarthy’s role in the controversy. He argued that McCarthy’s attacks endangered bipartisan foreign policy and defended Acheson’s standing. Truman’s own approval had fallen to 37 percent, while polls indicated that half the public viewed McCarthy favorably and thought he was helping the country. The President’s rebuke therefore came from a politically weakened position, against a senator whose notoriety had grown despite the lack of substantiation for his claims.

Truman had initially refused to give the Tydings Committee access to security files, citing principle. He later allowed Tydings and committee members to examine the files of the eighty-one people McCarthy had accused, hoping to help the investigation discredit the charges and answer Republican allegations of a cover-up. The move backfired in public perception: it made the President seem to be yielding to McCarthy. Truman remained convinced that the senator would eventually be exposed and urged his staff to stay calm, but neither reassurance nor rebuttal quickly dispelled the fear surrounding the campaign.

A different kind of Republican dissent came from Margaret Chase Smith, the Senate’s only woman, who condemned the use of fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear as a route to political victory. Truman praised her intervention, though he wished it had been more forceful and specific. Her statement offered a visible challenge from within McCarthy’s own party, while the episode as a whole showed that exposure alone could not guarantee that allegations would lose their influence. McCarthyism’s force lay not simply in what McCarthy could prove, but in the way repetition, publicity, partisan encouragement, and public anxiety made accusation consequential before proof arrived.