McCarthyism | Definition, History, & Facts (2024)

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• McCarthyism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

McCarthyism is part of the Red Scare period of American history in the late 1940s and 1950s. During that time, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy produced a series of investigations and hearings to expose supposed communist infiltration of various areas of the U.S. government. Other aspects of the Red Scare included the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood blacklist. The term McCarthyism has since become a byname for defamation of character or reputation by indiscriminate allegations on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.

The idea that it was necessary to guard against people seeking to overthrow the U.S. government took root early in the 20th century. Advances made by the Soviet Union following World War II, coupled with the victory in 1949 of the Chinese Communist Party in establishing the People’s Republic of China and the apparent inability of the United States to prevent the spread of communism, were among the factors causing fear of communist infiltration in the United States.

In 1950, Joseph McCarthy, who had been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he stated that the U.S. was engaged in a “battle between communistic atheism and Christianity” and declared that he had “here in my hand” a list of a large number of communists working in the State Department—a number that he gave at various times as 205, 81, and 57.The accusations triggered investigations and kept McCarthy and his search for communist subversion within the U.S. government in the spotlight.

Joseph McCarthy’s accusations of communist infiltration into the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the army’s charge that McCarthy had sought preferential treatment for a recently drafted associate led to 36 days of televised Senate hearings, known as the McCarthy hearings, that began in April 1954. The event showcased McCarthy’s bullying tactics and culminated when, after McCarthy charged that the army’s lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, employed a man who had once belonged to a communist front group, Welch responded, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Also in 1954, journalist Edward R. Morrow produced an exposé of McCarthy on his news program See It Now. The public turned against McCarthy, and the Senate censured him.

Joseph McCarthy’s charges that various government entities were infested with communists or communist sympathizers were mostly undocumented, and he was unable to make plausible charges against any person or institution. Nonetheless, his accusations resulted in some people losing their jobs and others facing popular condemnation. The persecution of innocent persons on the charge of being communist and the forced conformity that the practice engendered in public life came to be called McCarthyism.