Senate Tydings Inquiry Committee

The Senate Tydings Inquiry Committee was a special subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by Millard Tydings to investigate Joseph McCarthy’s accusations of Communist infiltration. Created in response to the growing controversy, it sought to test the charges in public. The hearings, however, brought McCarthy greater visibility, while a later attempt by Harry S. Truman to assist the inquiry made the administration appear to be giving ground to him.

Formation and Purpose

Senate Democrats called for a complete investigation of McCarthy’s charges, and the inquiry proceeded under Tydings, a respected and influential Democratic senator from Maryland. Its approach rested on the expectation that public scrutiny would expose the weakness of McCarthy’s accusations and cause his influence to fade. The committee was therefore meant not simply to receive allegations, but to make them answerable to examination.

Hearings and Public Attention

The hearings took place in the Senate’s marble-columned Caucus Room. Rather than diminishing McCarthy, the setting gave him a prominent stage and kept the press focused on him day after day. He portrayed the committee as more interested in identifying his informants than in finding security risks. By the end of March, six weeks after his initial outburst at Wheeling, he had not named a single Communist. Yet the inquiry’s publicity had magnified the accuser even as the central claim remained unsubstantiated.

The Lattimore Accusation

McCarthy then announced that Owen Lattimore was the top Russian espionage agent in the United States and had once been the superior of Alger Hiss and his alleged espionage ring. The evidence presented in the account sharply contradicts the accusation: Lattimore was neither a Communist nor an influential figure at the State Department. He had worked for the department for only four months in 1946, advising on a reparations mission in Japan. McCarthy nevertheless told the committee that breaking the case would produce the largest espionage case in the country’s history and said he was willing to stand or fall on it. The committee’s hearings thus became a platform for increasingly sweeping claims, not merely a forum in which earlier ones were tested.

Security Files and Political Consequences

Truman had initially refused to turn over security files to the Tydings Committee as a matter of principle. He later agreed to let Tydings and committee members examine the files of the eighty-one people McCarthy had accused. The move was intended to help the committee discredit McCarthy and answer a Republican charge that Truman was concealing evidence. Its political effect was the opposite: the President appeared to be caving in to McCarthy.

Tydings became deeply anxious about the situation, calling the White House three or four times a day, while Truman’s staff grew worried and tense. Truman urged them to remain calm, predicting that McCarthy would expose himself as a liar and eventually be expelled from the Senate. The episode captures the inquiry’s central difficulty: public investigation was expected to weaken McCarthy, but the attention it generated—and the appearance of presidential concession surrounding the files—helped sustain the controversy.