The Rise and Fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy

A Democrat until 1944, McCarthy began his political career as the youngest circuit judge in Wisconsin’s history, defeating an incumbent who had held the position for 24 years. During the race, McCarthy alleged that his opponent was 73 years old, when in fact he was only 66. It was one of the first times McCarthy would use such manufactured accusations against his political opponents, but it was far from the last.

Joining the Marine Corps during World War II, McCarthy served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron, volunteering to fly a dozen combat missions as a gunner-observer. Though these missions were generally considered safe, McCarthy would later burnish them into a reputation of wartime heroism. 

According to historian David M. Oshinsky, McCarthy got the nickname “Tail-Gunner Joe” due to his “wish to break the record for most live ammunition discharged in a single mission”—never mind that the shots were mostly taken at coconut trees.

During his 1946 campaign to defeat three-term senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. for the Republican primary in Wisconsin, McCarthy used his wartime record to his advantage, attacking La Follette for not enlisting—despite the fact that La Follette was 46 years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed—and publicizing his own military nickname, using the slogan, “Congress needs a tail-gunner.”

These techniques were successful, and McCarthy not only beat out La Follette for the Republican primary but was elected to the Senate. Though a popular speaker, his early years at the Senate are considered unremarkable by most historians, a fact that would suddenly change on February 9, 1950.

During a Lincoln Day speech that he was presenting to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy held up a piece of paper, claiming that it contained a list of known communists working for the State Department. 

“The State Department is infested with communists,” McCarthy is alleged to have said (no audio recording of this initial speech has been saved). “I have here in my hand a list of 205—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.”

This speech was delivered at the height of the Cold War which followed the end of World War II, and the fear of communist infiltration into American life was widespread. Predictably, then, this claim to have a list of the “enemies within” catapulted McCarthy to the center of political and media attention. 

Within months, the term “McCarthyism” had been coined by political cartoonist Herbert Block, who used it as a synonym for defamation and mudslinging. Just as he had with his wartime nickname, however, McCarthy turned it to his advantage, stating, in a 1952 speech, that “McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.”

McCarthy never actually revealed the source of his supposed list of communists within the State Department (and, later, elsewhere), and the claims that he made about them varied, including irregularities in the number that were said to exist. The accusation alone, however, was enough to prompt an investigation by a subcommittee of the United State Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

The final report of the subcommittee labeled the charges a “fraud and a hoax,” saying that the accusations served to “confused and divide the American people…to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves.”

Reaction to the subcommittee’s findings were split along partisan lines, with the Democratic majority supporting the report of the subcommittee, while Republicans sided with McCarthy and his claims of communist infiltration.

Despite the findings of the initial subcommittee convened to investigate his allegations, McCarthy continued to make his assertions of widespread communism within the American government the central pillar of his career in the Senate.

Across two administrations—Truman and Eisenhower—McCarthy continued to attack his political enemies with claims of their communist affiliations, while engaging in what have since been dubbed “witch hunts” for anyone who might harbor communist sympathies. 

These “witch hunts” spread beyond government, exacerbating ongoing Hollywood blacklists prompted by the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In fact, the two are often regarded synonymously, even though McCarthy—a senator, and not a member of the House—actually had no involvement with the House Un-American Activities Committee and its hearings.

Instead, McCarthy was chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, which gave him enough leeway to continue his investigations into supposed widespread communism in the government. Years later, Senators Susan Collins and Carl Levin wrote that, “Senator McCarthy’s zeal to uncover subversion and espionage led to disturbing excesses.”

Eventually, that zeal and the power granted him by his position on what was then the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led him to target the United States Army, an act which would eventually result in counter-allegations of corruption on McCarthy’s part and the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.

Unlike most of McCarthy’s other investigations, the Army-McCarthy hearings were heavily publicized, broadcast live to an estimated 20 million viewers. Though the hearing itself led to a relatively inconclusive end, the exposure was devastating for McCarthy.

Gallup polls conducted before the hearings began showed around 50% of Americans holding a favorable opinion of McCarthy—by June, that number had fallen to less than 35%. “You’re not fooling anyone,” McCarthy told Senator Stuart Symington late in the hearings. Symington replied, “Senator, the American people have had a look at you now for six weeks; you’re not fooling anyone, either.”

By the end of the hearings, McCarthy was seen as a “major liability to the cause of anti-communism,” as Frederick Woltman put it in a five-part article series for the New York World-Telegram, and his support was waning, even among fellow Republicans. 

By the middle of the year, fellow Republican senator Ralph E. Flanders had introduced a resolution to censure McCarthy, saying that, “Were the Junior Senator from Wisconsin in the pay of the Communists he could not have done a better job for them.” 

Committee hearings began on August 31, and on December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to “condemn” McCarthy on two of the 46 counts that had been brought against him, including failure to cooperate with a subcommittee which had subpoenaed him.

Though censured, McCarthy continued on as the Senator from Wisconsin for another two-and-a-half years, until his unexpected death in 1957, but his time as a major public or political figure was over. Its legacy would live on, however, continuing to affect how we discuss and describe such accusations to this very day, when the term “McCarthyism” is still used as a shorthand for witch hunts, scapegoating, and demagoguery.

Featured image: United States Senate Historical Office