Highlights Archives
Remembering Joseph McCarthy, 50 Years Later
May marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who for four years in the early 1950s, held the nation in his grasp with his anti-communist rhetoric. To his enemies, McCarthy was evil incarnate, but to his supporters, he was an ardent champion of freedom. The notorious senator, whose name has become synonymous with Cold War history, is the subject of this month's featured gallery from Wisconsin Historical Images, the Society's online image database.
Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, Joseph McCarthy created a sensation in 1950 when he announced during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that communist members of the State Department were influencing American foreign policy. At the time, communist expansion in Eastern Europe and Korea fueled Americans' anxiety that their way of life was under attack. The timing of McCarthy's proclamation — just as Americans were preparing to fight in Korea — capitalized on people's fears of encroaching communism by launching a public campaign aimed at eliminating the supposed communist infiltration of government.
Re-elected in 1952, McCarthy, as chair of a Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, took it upon himself to expose communists and their sympathizers throughout all of American cultural and political life. The subcommittee interrogated more than 500 people under his leadership, often refusing to reveal their sources of information under the veil of national security. In 1953, however, McCarthy took it too far when he accused the Army of harboring communists. The televised Army-McCarthy hearings that ensued exposed many Americans to McCarthy's bullying tactics and ruined his public reputation. The next year, the Senate officially censured McCarthy for "conduct unbecoming a senator." Ostracised from his party and suffering from alcoholism, McCarthy died just three years later, in 1957.
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:: Posted May 9, 2007
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