McCarthyism
McCarthyism begins, in many ways, not with the senator whose name it bears, but with a single sheet of paper. On the 9th of February 1950, Joseph McCarthy stood before the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and brandished what he claimed was a list of known communists inside the State Department. "I have here in my hand a list of 205," he declared, "a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." The press flooded toward the story. Within weeks, a new word had entered the American language. By the end of that year, hundreds of people had already lost their jobs, and thousands more would follow. What made McCarthyism possible? Who really drove it? And what did it cost the country that waged it?
The era that carries McCarthy's name had been building for years before he gave that speech in Wheeling. President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9835, signed on the 21st of March 1947, required all federal civil-service employees to be screened for "loyalty" and allowed dismissal on "reasonable grounds" of disloyalty. The order was partly a political response to a Republican sweep in the 1946 Congressional elections. The following year, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia staged a coup, deepening Western anxiety. In 1949, the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb earlier than many analysts had expected, and Mao Zedong's forces took control of mainland China despite heavy American financial backing of the Kuomintang. The Korean War began in 1950, drawing U.S. and United Nations forces into direct combat against North Korean and Chinese communist armies. Each of these events added fresh oxygen to fears that had never fully died since the First Red Scare of 1917 to 1920. The Communist Party of the United States had also not helped its own case: its membership had peaked at roughly 75,000 in 1940-41, and post-war declassified documents from the Venona project confirmed that Moscow had provided substantial financial support to the CPUSA and exercised significant influence over its policies.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was, by one historian's account, "the single most important component of the anti-communist crusade." Historian Ellen Schrecker put it plainly: had Americans known in the 1950s what the Freedom of Information Act later revealed about the Bureau's conduct, the era would probably carry Hoover's name, not McCarthy's. Hoover personally designed Truman's loyalty-security program, and the FBI carried out its background investigations. The bureau grew from 3,559 agents in 1946 to 7,029 in 1952 partly on the strength of this mandate. Hoover insisted on keeping the identities of his informers secret, meaning most subjects of loyalty reviews could not cross-examine or even learn the names of their accusers. From 1951 to 1955, the FBI ran a covert "Responsibilities Program" that distributed anonymous documents about alleged communist affiliations of teachers, lawyers, and others, resulting in many firings with no further process. The bureau also conducted illegal burglaries, opened mail, and ran illegal wiretaps. The office of the National Lawyers Guild, one of the few legal organizations willing to defend clients in communist-related cases, was burgled by the FBI at least 14 times between 1947 and 1951. In 1956, frustrated by Supreme Court decisions limiting the Justice Department's ability to prosecute communists, Hoover formalized a covert program he called COINTELPRO, which planted forged documents, spread rumors through anonymous letters, called for IRS audits, and leaked information to the press. The program ran until 1971.
In October 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities began subpoenaing screenwriters, directors, and other film industry workers to testify about their alleged membership in the Communist Party. The central question at every hearing was: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?" Ten witnesses who refused to cooperate and invoked their First Amendment rights became known as the Hollywood Ten. Two were sentenced to six months in prison; the other eight received a year each. On the 25th of November 1947, the day after the House approved contempt citations against the Ten, Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, issued what came to be called the Waldorf Statement, announcing the Ten's firing and pledging that the studios would not knowingly employ a communist. This marked the formal start of the Hollywood blacklist, though the studios simultaneously denied any blacklist existed. More than 300 actors, authors, and directors were ultimately denied work. Private loyalty review boards appeared to meet industry demand, publishing books such as Red Channels and newsletters such as Counterattack to track leftist individuals and organizations. In 1960, the blacklist began to crack when Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, was publicly credited as the writer of the films Exodus and Spartacus.
Estimating the full toll of McCarthyism is not straightforward. Hundreds were imprisoned, and somewhere between ten and twelve thousand people lost their jobs. Blacklists touched not just the film industry but universities, schools, the legal profession, and labor unions. A port-security program launched by the Coast Guard shortly after the Korean War began required loyalty reviews for every maritime worker loading or working aboard American ships, and nearly 3,000 seamen and longshoremen lost their positions. In 1958, an estimated one in every five workers in the United States was required to pass some form of loyalty review. The Department of Justice's list of subversive organizations, first made public in 1948, eventually reached 154 groups, 110 of them identified as communist. Membership in the Washington Bookshop Association, which offered lectures on literature, classical music concerts, and book discounts, was among the most common causes for suspicion. State governments joined in: Michigan enacted life imprisonment for subversive propaganda in 1950, and Tennessee enacted the death penalty for advocating the violent overthrow of the government the following year. The governor of Texas publicly discussed imposing the death penalty for membership in the Communist Party. A separate campaign, called the "lavender scare," targeted suspected homosexuals, who were characterized as security risks. Over 5,000 federal workers were fired in this campaign alone.
Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, a Republican, rose on the floor of the Senate on the 1st of June 1950 to deliver what she called a "Declaration of Conscience". She called for an end to "character assassinations" and named the right to criticize, hold unpopular beliefs, protest, and think independently as basic principles of Americanism. Six of her Republican colleagues joined her in condemning McCarthy's tactics. President Truman, who had initiated his own loyalty program, nonetheless vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, writing in his veto message: "In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have." His veto was overridden. Edward R. Murrow, the CBS broadcaster, aired an episode of See It Now on the 20th of October 1953 about the dismissal of Milo Radulovich, a former reserve Air Force lieutenant whose accusers presented their evidence in a sealed envelope that Radulovich and his attorney were not permitted to open. A follow-up episode on the 9th of March 1954 assembled footage of McCarthy's own speeches to portray him as dishonest and abusive. In his closing comment, Murrow said: "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law." The broadcast has since been cited as a turning point in public opinion.
McCarthy's committee turned toward the United States Army in early 1954, beginning with the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth. The spy ring McCarthy alleged there ultimately came to nothing. His committee then took up the case of an Army dentist who had been promoted to major despite refusing to answer questions on a loyalty review form. McCarthy's handling of the investigation, including a sequence of insults aimed at a brigadier general, brought on the Army-McCarthy hearings, a 36-day televised confrontation broadcast live on the American Broadcasting Company network. The public exchange that may have done the most damage to McCarthy came when he reminded Army attorney Joseph Welch that a junior member of Welch's law firm had once belonged to an organization accused of Communist sympathies. Welch's response became one of the most quoted lines of the era: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" On the 2nd of December 1954, the United States Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure McCarthy for conduct tending to bring the Senate into "dishonor and disrepute." His standing in anti-communist politics was essentially finished.
The Warren Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, issued a sequence of rulings that steadily dismantled the legal framework of McCarthyism. In 1956, the Court's ruling in Slochower v. Board of Education reversed the firing of Brooklyn College professor Harry Slochower, who had invoked the Fifth Amendment before McCarthy's committee. The court held that treating the exercise of a constitutional right as evidence of guilt reduced that right to a "hollow mockery." In the 1957 case Yates v. United States, convictions of fourteen communists were reversed, with Justice Hugo Black writing that guilt or innocence cannot be determined by what Marx or Engels wrote a hundred years prior. Also in 1957, Watkins v. United States curtailed HUAC's power to hold uncooperative witnesses in contempt of Congress. The Court's 1958 ruling in Kent v. Dulles halted the State Department from denying or revoking passports based on communist beliefs. Off the bench, the private blacklisting system crumbled after John Henry Faulk, a CBS Radio host fired after being flagged by the private firm AWARE, Inc., sued in 1957 and won in 1962. With that verdict, private loyalty checkers faced legal liability for the professional and financial damage they caused, and the agencies soon disappeared. Historian Ellen Schrecker, who had proposed calling the era "Hooverism," left a sharp final accounting: "in this country, McCarthyism did more damage to the Constitution than the American Communist Party ever did."
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Common questions
What was McCarthyism and when did it occur?
McCarthyism was a period of political repression and persecution targeting left-wing individuals, driven by fears of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions, running from the late 1940s through the 1950s. It is also called the Second Red Scare or the McCarthy era. The term was first published on the 28th of March 1950 in the Christian Science Monitor.
What speech started Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist campaign?
McCarthy launched his public campaign with a speech on the 9th of February 1950 to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed to hold a list of 205 known communists working in the State Department. The speech generated immediate and widespread press attention.
Who were the Hollywood Ten?
The Hollywood Ten were ten film industry workers, including screenwriters and directors, who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947 and cited the First Amendment. Two received six-month prison sentences and the other eight received one-year sentences for contempt of Congress.
What role did J. Edgar Hoover play in McCarthyism?
Hoover, as FBI director, designed President Truman's loyalty-security program and supervised its investigations, growing the bureau from 3,559 to 7,029 agents between 1946 and 1952. He ran a secret "Responsibilities Program" from 1951 to 1955 distributing anonymous documents to trigger firings, and formalized the COINTELPRO program in 1956, which operated until 1971.
How did the Supreme Court help end McCarthyism?
The Warren Court issued a series of rulings beginning in 1956 that reversed key legal pillars of McCarthyism. Key decisions included Slochower v. Board of Education (1956), Yates v. United States (1957), Watkins v. United States (1957), and Kent v. Dulles (1958), which collectively limited loyalty-review firings, reversed communist convictions under the Smith Act, curtailed HUAC's contempt power, and blocked passport denials based on communist beliefs.
How many people lost their jobs or were imprisoned during McCarthyism?
Hundreds of people were imprisoned and an estimated ten to twelve thousand lost their jobs. In 1958, roughly one in every five U.S. workers was required to pass some form of loyalty review. The lavender scare, a parallel campaign targeting suspected homosexuals, resulted in over 5,000 federal workers being fired.
Why do some historians say the era should be called Hooverism rather than McCarthyism?
Historian Ellen Schrecker argued that J. Edgar Hoover was more central to the anti-communist apparatus than McCarthy, designing the loyalty programs, directing illegal surveillance, and running covert disruption campaigns. Schrecker wrote that had the FBI's conduct been known in the 1950s, the era would likely carry Hoover's name, not McCarthy's.
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