McCarthyism

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?" In the 1950s, thousands of Americans who worked in the government, served in the army, worked in the movie industry, and just about anyone else had to answer that question before a congressional panel. Senator Joseph McCarthy rose to national attention by initiating a probe to drive out communists holding prominent positions.

But McCarthy did not start the movement against Soviet-style Communism, he simply took the fervor and used it to further his own career, greatly fueling the fire in the process. Anti-Communist sentiments began in America as early as 1917, soon after the Bolshevik revolution that turned the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. But the general public outcries and concerns didn’t materialize until after World War II.

During the Yalta Conference following the war in 1945, Roosevelt tried to negotiate a peace with Stalin. But after FDR’s death that year, before any peace could be reached, American officials became increasingly concerned at the Soviet Union’s obvious attempts to control the Eastern Bloc nations it now occupied. No singular event triggered the anti-communist fervor. It was, in fact, a build-up of several events over the following years; disagreements over Poland in 1945, Soviet pressure on Turkey in 1946, Greek Civil War in 1947, Berlin Blockade in 1948, Mao Zedong’s communist takeover of China in 1949, and the Korean War in 1950.

Enter Joseph McCarthy, the junior Senator from Wisconsin. In February, 1950 he gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he claimed to have a list of 205 names belonging to communists in the State Department. Although those names were never released, they didn’t need to be for the public to listen and run with the idea. By the time McCarthy made his claims, the public was already forming its anti-communist sentiments.

This made it easy for McCarthy to successfully further his own political agenda. He was seen by the people as a crusader against the communist threat, and he used that platform brilliantly, at least at first. Own of his greatest successes lay in the fact that he never named specific names. He would point to groups or organizations, but not a single person. He let the public and other government officials fill in the blanks for themselves. McCarthy played the man behind the curtain, while simultaneously being the man in the