by Michael Liss
I have here in my hand a list of 205 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy. —Joseph McCarthy, February 9, 1950
Seventy-four years later, that phrase, from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Wheeling (West Virginia) “Enemies Within” speech, still has the capacity to remind us of an era when America’s faith in its own institutions was challenged almost to the breaking point. It was a time of bullying and blacklists, screaming headlines and wild accusations. “McCarthyism” became the byword for a type of paranoid style in politics where the power of the government is turned on the individual for merely exercising his or her rights.
The speech itself is neither eloquent nor subtle. The former amateur boxer wades in with both fists. It’s likely even built on a lie—there was no list—at least not one McCarthy would let people look at. There was no precise number. There are multiple versions of the speech, some have it at 205, others 57 or 71. McCarthy liked the mystery—part of his peculiar genius was his ability to mangle the truth in a way that left reporters eager for more.
Of its political impact, there can be no question. Wheeling vaulted the relatively unknown (and frankly often disliked) 41-year-old first termer to national prominence, a place he would occupy without pause for most of the next five years.
McCarthy was not new to the Senate. He had been elected in 1946, seemingly coming out of nowhere to “primary” the Republican incumbent Robert “Young Bob” LaFollette Jr., an “heir” to the LaFollette political dynasty begun by his father, “Fighting Bob” LaFollette. Fighting Bob was a stalwart spokesman for Progressive policies, ran as a third-party candidate for President in 1924 on the Progressive line (winning his home state), and served four terms in the Senate. Young Bob’s brother Philip was a three-term Governor of Wisconsin, ahead of even FDR in enacting progressive/New Deal-like programs during the Great Depression. The brothers also co-founded the Wisconsin Progressive Party. Young Bob seemed much less the fighter than his Dad, but, when Fighting Bob died in 1925, Young Bob won a special election to fill the balance of Dad’s Senate term. He then surprised everyone by transforming himself into an articulate, passionate, and effective advocate for Progressive policies.
In 1946, Young Bob made a mistake that would cost him his seat and the country its sanity. He decided to dismantle the Wisconsin Progressive Party, which, at that point, was largely just a family vehicle, and sought to resume his role as a (progressive) Republican. The problem was that “progressive Republicans” had essentially disappeared and the party had become dominated by the hard right. Across the general electorate, Young Bob was popular. Had he chosen to run for the Democratic nomination, he would have been welcomed. In a GOP primary, he was vulnerable.
He began to take hits from both sides. The Democratic nominee, Howard McMurray, slammed Young Bob’s Isolationism. McCarthy pummeled him from the other direction, outworking and certainly outsliming the incumbent. In the end, the LaFollette name (and residual affection for Young Bob) almost saved him, but McCarthy took the primary by about 5,000 votes out of 440,000 cast. He then went on to overwhelm McMurray.
Tailgunner Joe had the job, but what was he going to do with it? Not a lot, and just about everything. He picked his spots—notably on housing and post-war sugar rationing—but with limited effect, in part because he had few allies. The Senate press corps voted him “Worst Senator” and it was probably merited.
It just wasn’t that easy to like him. McCarthy was loud, crass, and had very sharp elbows. He had huge appetites, for gambling at the track and all-night poker games, for money from any place he could get it, for food, booze, women (and, it was rumored, men), and always for power. In the tradition-bound Senate, with its seniority system, its stuffy procedures and Senatorial courtesies, McCarthy found himself unable to play the game the normal way.
He needed something of his own, something he could sink his teeth into, where he could throw out the rule book. He was about to get it. One of the things about successful demagogues is that they have an acute ear for the opportunistic moment. Other people’s pain was to be McCarthy’s pleasure—and the sharpest pangs in January of 1950 had to belong to Harry Truman.
Whatever joy Truman had felt when he won his come-from-behind reelection over Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 was fully dissipated. Just a few months into his new term came the lightning bolt of Mao’s victory over Chiang Kai-Shek for Mainland China, with Chiang’s Nationalist forces relegated to what was then called Formosa. During the summer of 1949, American spy planes got a whiff of atomic fallout over Russia, and we found ourselves no longer in possession of a nuclear monopoly. The blame for both were laid at Truman’s feet. In the telling, his diplomatic approach and that of his team, especially in the State Department, had “lost China.” His “weakness” invited aggression by our mortal enemies.
There were whispers that it might have been more than that. Perhaps Truman had been duped, or men in his Administration had colluded with those enemies? The subsequent revelation that the State Department’s Alger Hiss was charged with spying for the Russians added gasoline to the fire. Leading Republicans, led by Robert Taft, who was expected to be their nominee in 1952, certainly fed it with their constant denunciations, but the alarm felt was bipartisan. Even being generous, Truman had dropped the ball, or perhaps he’d been taken in. What was undeniable for many was that the America that had conquered Fascism and that had transformed itself into a superpower was now facing an existential challenge.
In January of 1950, informed by evidence developed by both American and British intelligence that Russian spies (most notably Klaus Fuchs) had penetrated the Manhattan Project, it became clear that Russia not only knew details about the A-Bomb, but also about the potential for building H-Bombs, which would be far more destructive than those that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A debate went on in the Administration between those who wanted to limit the spread of nuclear weapons through arms-control treaties and those who felt diplomacy would be ineffective without a trustworthy partner. Truman sided with the latter and announced to the American public both the theoretical existence of a thermonuclear bomb and his conviction that America must build an arsenal of them.
Ten days later, McCarthy went to Wheeling. Read the text, and you can see how incendiary it was—but also how brilliant in its demagoguery. After four years in the wilderness, Joe McCarthy was truly launched. His more mainstream friends worried about overreach, but suddenly he had new ones. Reporters from the supportive Hearst chain were detailed to help him dig out dirt. Then-Congressman (and Hiss-chaser) Richard Nixon offered to open his HUAC files to McCarthy. J. Edgard Hoover pitched in. And, to add a little more fuel to it, McCarthy was getting support from ordinary Americans who weren’t necessarily drawn to conspiracy theories, but couldn’t shake the suspicion, even the conviction, that they were not being told the truth.
Democrats, who still held the Senate, tried to slow McCarthy down by naming a special committee to investigate his accusations. McCarthy was allowed to sit in, although not a member, and broke every rule there was to break. The Committee’s Chair, Maryland’s Millard Tydings, tried, but, in the end, McCarthy was a vastly superior infighter. The hearings produced a report denounced by Republicans as partisan, but also one that could not fully exonerate people accused of activities they did not commit. McCarthy, to his fans, and even to Republicans who were not enamored of his style, was seen as shaking things up that needed a good shake.
McCarthy had become a law unto himself. People tripped over themselves to send him tips. Enormous amounts of money came his way—not just from old supporters like the three Texas uber-conservative millionaires who opened their checkbooks continuously, but from a lot of what we would call small-dollar contributors. Envelopes stuffed with cash, sometimes with just a few dollars, once one with an endorsed Social Security check, were delivered in huge bags by the postman and counted in a back office.
Eisenhower’s coattails in 1952 helped the Republicans take back the Senate, and McCarthy was given the chairmanship of the Senate Government Operations Committee. There he hired Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy and slashed through a series of investigations, finding some subversive activity, ruining the lives of far more innocents. The ruthlessness and disregard for basic civic norms intensified, as did McCarthy’s personal demons—more gambling, more drinking, more excess. He was out of control, but possessed enormous power.
In the end, it was something stupidly small that brought him down. In 1953, McCarthy had turned his attention to possible subversion in the Army, and had included a number of esteemed figures, including George C. Marshall, the architect of the Marshall Plan. The Army pushed back, accusing McCarthy of seeking special treatment for an aide, Private G. David Schine, who was an investigator for the Committee and an intimate friend of Cohn’s. The Army refused; the dispute escalated; and the Senate assigned the investigation to the very Committee that McCarthy chaired, compelling him to recuse himself. It was to be great theatre. Two networks, ABC and Dumont, gave it gavel-to-gavel coverage, and the chamber was filled with reporters.
The Army hearings went badly for McCarthy. He couldn’t control his worst excesses, both on camera and off. The emotional climax came in a confrontation between Army lawyer Joseph Welch and McCarthy himself. McCarthy, seemingly forgetting that Welch and Cohn had made a deal not to discuss one of Welch’s law-firm colleagues, Fred Fisher, in return for not discussing Cohn’s personal draft-dodging (a serious, career-altering offense in those days), launched into a denunciation of Fisher. If you look at the old film, you can see Cohn shaking his head as if to say “no” to McCarthy. McCarthy continued, but it was Welch who carried the day with “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
Support for McCarthy crumbled, first slowly, then basically all at one time. Later that year, the Senate voted to condemn his behavior. The true diehards, his base, never entirely left him, but influential people, important people, stopped returning his calls, stopped inviting him to meetings and parties. His speeches in the Senate were delivered to a mostly empty chamber. The media, which had breathlessly followed his every word, lost interest. He stopped being front-page news, then eventually just dropped off. His world began to close in on him, and his health deteriorated. He was in and out of the hospital for a variety of ailments, some of them clearly related to his drinking. He died in 1957, just 48 years old.
The vast number of people who found their lives irrevocably altered by McCarthy is only part of the legacy of McCarthyism, and perhaps the less important part. We need to spend a bit of time on how he became so fearsome, why he was able to shake up the Establishment in such a profound way, and, why, 67 years after his death, “McCarthyism” remains relevant.
Let’s start with something that should be self-evident. The Wheeling speech may have launched McCarthy, but he was using tools already in place. America had spent years experimenting with a variety of forms of illiberalism. Under FDR’s 1942 Order 9066, more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent were stuffed into internment camps. Wartime domestic surveillance capacity, particularly at the FBI, had been expanded exponentially, and powerful elements in the government—the OSS and the FBI (with the adroit J. Edgar Hoover)—saw no reason to curtail them in peacetime, so the infrastructure remained in place. Word was going out that, notwithstanding what the Constitution might say about freedom of assembly, if you worked for the government, it was unwise to be associated with anyone of “Communist’ leanings. Both formally and informally, a number of people were shown the door or transferred to more remote positions.
Truman himself instituted a loyalty program for working in the federal government; there were prosecutions for even belonging to the Communist Party; and, in the Spring of 1947, came what was known as the “Attorney General’s List.”
Initially, the List was only intended to aid the evaluation of current and potential federal employees by compiling names of organizations in four different classifications: Communist, Fascist, totalitarian and subversive. If an employee (or prospective employee) belonged to any of these groups, that would trigger additional layers of investigations to meet Truman’s “Loyalty Tests.”
This was new—not even in wartime had the government applied this standard, but it got worse. Later in 1947, the List was published, and very quickly private employers in a wide range of fields began to use it. What followed was a grotesque violation of basic civil rights—no privacy, no due process, no actual culpability, and no mechanism for defense. The List became the basis for categorizing and excluding people from their chosen fields.
Did FDR act on legitimate fears? The best we can possibly give him is that it was a misjudgment. Did Truman, locked into a situation in which paranoia seemed justified to so many, have to take the course he did, build the surveillance state, and animate the “blacklist” one? An unqualified No. If anything, the overlap between Truman’s policies and the ruthlessness and brutality of McCarthyism shows a familial relationship which was too close for comfort.
What about the people who, in our civil society, we rely upon to be “good guys” and uphold basic liberties? McCarthyism showed that the threat of direct violence, either physical or to a career, is more than enough to motivate many to stay silent, to self-edit, to go along. For others, including those you think might be better than that, the lure of spoils and partisan gain make them into enablers. Finally, there are those who are genuinely challenged by the balance of civil liberties versus threats, but fear being tagged for each security break. Better to arrest ten too many than one too few.
Few people took on McCarthy. Truman barked back, but no one cared—he was one of the enemy. Just about all elected Republicans stayed quiet or rooted for McCarthy. The one Republican who didn’t was Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith, who, in June of 1950, gave her “Declaration of Conscience” speech. She paid the price—both in McCarthy’s dubbing her “Moscow Maggie” and the silence of her colleagues. A few weeks later, the North Koreans poured into South Korea; we were in another war; and GOP support for McCarthy hardened.
The biggest name of all, Eisenhower, didn’t take on McCarthy. First, he had an election to win in 1952. Then, the time never seemed exactly right. Not when McCarthy went after Ike’s mentor, George C. Marshall. Not even after McCarthy targeted Ike’s younger brother Milton, who was an academic and not a politician. Ike kept still. Pressure rose on him to do something—but he was irritated by that as well—many of the same people urging him to take down McCarthy had enabled him on his rise.
Where was the press in all this? McCarthy was one of the most adept manipulators of the press of the 20th century. He understood that reporters crave access and a story. They want to make the deadline, and be first page, above the fold, with their bylines. They want to rise in the ranks—from wire services to regional newspapers, from regional to national. For the elite, there were columns and even book deals. McCarthy couldn’t promise any of them these spoils, but if you played ball, maybe something would come of it. Some journalists (like Edward R. Murrow) were courageous. More took the easier way out. Everyone knew that McCarthy was willing to cut people off. Drew Pearson, one of the most powerful columnists around, also had a television show, and he felt McCarthy’s sting when the Senator called for an economic boycott. That type of animosity could be a career-killer. The press mostly fell in line.
Finally, let’s not forget the voters. They weren’t always sticklers. McCarthy was very popular with his base. Many understood and forgave his exaggerations and excesses because they thought he stood with them—and no one, besides his political enemies, were about to rebut that. Joe was a regular guy fighting the striped-pants elites at the State Department. He was challenging the Commies who threatened to bury us while official Washington talked about discussion and détente. Joe didn’t go to Harvard; he had no airs; he was one of them. He reached the apex of his popularity in January 1954, with Gallup showing him at 50-29, favorable to unfavorable. A few months later, his positives fell into the 30s, as the exposure of the Army-McCarthy hearings cast him in a bad light, but his baseline support held.
A democracy that dismisses the concerns of voters like McCarthy’s loyalists risks losing them forever. A media that doesn’t confront actual wrongdoing because of self-interest or a phony attempt to be balanced risks not being heard when the threats are too great. A political class that allows itself to be lured by spoils or frightened by threats suddenly finds itself without political power. Finally, a society that trades liberty for security gets neither.
McCarthyism didn’t die with the Army-McCarthy Hearings, and it didn’t die with McCarthy himself. It sits like a virus in the system, seemingly dormant, but all the while the security state grows and surveillance technology gets ever more sophisticated.
Joe McCarthy gave us a gift, albeit unwittingly. He was right when he said:
When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.