The Wheeling speech marked the moment Joseph McCarthy found an issue that could propel him from obscurity into national politics: alleged Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. Its immediate impact was limited, but the claim soon grew more sensational as McCarthy repeated and revised it, drawing attention that ultimately amplified rather than dispelled his accusations. The episode unfolded amid an atmosphere of fear, and its significance lay not in proof of the charge, which McCarthy did not produce, but in the political power the charge acquired.

Background and the search for an issue

By January 1950, McCarthy was a forty-one-year-old junior senator from Wisconsin with little standing in the Senate. He was nearly friendless there and had recently been voted the chamber’s worst member in a poll of Washington correspondents. He had made loud but unremarkable allegations of Communist subversion before, yet had not found a claim that could lift him out of obscurity.

The book places his turn toward Communist infiltration in a wider climate of apprehension. Fear had become so pervasive, cartoonist Herb Block recalled, that only a small spark was needed to ignite it. Over dinner at the Colony Restaurant, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University suggested that McCarthy sound an alarm about Communists inside the government. McCarthy appears to have recognized the political potential of the suggestion. A month later, on Lincoln’s Birthday, he delivered the speech in West Virginia that would become known as the Wheeling speech.

The claim and its changing figures

In Wheeling, McCarthy waved a piece of paper and claimed that it contained the names of 205 “known Communists” in the State Department. The speech initially went largely unnoticed. That first version did not remain stable: at appearances in Salt Lake City and Reno soon afterward, he made essentially the same allegation but reduced the number to fifty-seven, describing the supposed Communists as “card-carrying.” The altered figure did not blunt the charge. Instead, the repeated allegation began generating headlines across the country.

Back in the Senate, McCarthy carried the campaign further in a five-hour performance. He said he had penetrated “Truman’s iron curtain of secrecy” and uncovered eighty-one names. The succession of totals made the accusation more conspicuous while leaving its central claim unsubstantiated. The figures shifted from speech to speech, but McCarthy continued to present the underlying story as evidence of Communist penetration of government.

Attention, investigation, and escalation

McCarthy’s accusations were wild and unsupported. He produced no names and no new evidence. The press described him as desperate and reckless, and characterized his hunt as a burlesque of the serious work of security checks. Yet criticism did not slow him. The more sensational the allegation, the more likely it was to receive prominent coverage; to a growing audience, the possibility that he might be wrong about particular claims did not prevent a suspicion that he was exposing something real.

Democratic senators called for an investigation, expecting that public scrutiny would expose the weakness of the charges. A special subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Millard Tydings, began hearings in the marble-columned Caucus Room. The setting gave McCarthy a public stage and sustained press attention. He argued that the committee wanted to identify and punish his informants rather than discover security risks. By the end of March—six weeks after his initial outburst at Wheeling—he had still not named a single Communist.

The accusations continued to expand. McCarthy identified Owen J. Lattimore, a former State Department employee then directing the Johns Hopkins School of International Relations, as the “top Russian espionage agent” in the United States and the onetime boss of Alger Hiss’s espionage ring. The book describes the allegation as a fraud: Lattimore was neither a Communist nor an influential State Department figure, and had worked for the department for only four months in 1946 as an adviser on a reparations mission in Japan.

Significance

The Wheeling speech mattered less as a substantiated revelation than as the opening move in a political performance that gained force through repetition, shifting numbers, and publicity. Its first claim attracted little notice; later versions and the Senate spectacle transformed the allegation into a national story. The inquiry intended to test and contain McCarthy’s charges instead gave him a prominent platform, while the absence of evidence did not keep the accusations from shaping public suspicion. The episode thus shows how, in a fearful political climate, an unsupported claim could become influential through attention even as its particulars remained unproved.