Joseph McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy (born November 15, 1908, died May 2, 1957) was a United States Republican Senator from the state of Wisconsin. He is famous for lending his name to McCarthyism, the period of intense anti-communism that occurred in America from around 1948 to the mid-1950s.

McCarthy was born on a farm in the town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin. He worked his way through a law degree at Marquette University in Milwaukee from 1930 to 1935, and was admitted to the bar in 1935. While working in a law firm in the town of Shawano, he launched an unsuccessful campaign to become District Attorney as a Democrat in 1936. In 1939, he campaigned successfully for election as a circuit judge.

Shortly after the United States joined the Second World War in 1942, McCarthy took a commission as a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, although his judicial office would have exempted him from compulsory service. He saw combat as an observer and gunner on bombing missions in the South Pacific.

He campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination in Wisconsin while still on active duty in 1944, but was easily defeated by incumbent Alexander Wiley. After resigning his commission in April 1945 and being re-elected unopposed to his circuit court position, he began a much more systematic campaign for the 1946 Senate election, challenging the other Wisconsin incumbent, Robert M. LaFollette Jr. McCarthy enjoyed the support of the state party organization, and won the nomination narrowly. He easily defeated his Democratic opponent in the election.

As a first-term senator, McCarthy was unremarkable, and his voting record was conservative but not entirely in line with party policy. He was hungry for popular and media attention, however, and made a large amount of speeches to many different organisations, covering a wide range of topics. His most notable early campaigns were for housing legislation and against sugar rationing. His national profile was to rise meteorically after his infamous speech of February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.

McCarthy's exact words in the speech are a matter of some dispute, as they were not reliably recorded at the time, the media presence being minimal. It is generally agreed, however, that he produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of 205 people that were known as communists by the State Department. One version of the speech reports his words as "I have in my hand a list of 205 cases of individuals who appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party."

The list itself, if it actually existed, was probably a garbled version of a State Department document which listed employees over whom there were various concerns not merely related to loyalty but also including issues such as drunkenness and incompetence. The effect of McCarthy's speech, however, in a nation already worried by the aggressiveness of the Soviet Union in Europe and alarmed by the trial of Alger Hiss, which was in progress as McCarthy made his speech, was electric. McCarthy himself was taken aback at the massive media response to the speech, and continually revised both his charges and his figures over the following days, a characteristic feature of his method of operation. In Salt Lake City a few days later he cited a figure of 57, and in the Senate on 20 February he claimed 81. He made a marathon speech discussing all these cases in detail, but the evidence for many was tenuous or non-existent; nevertheless, the impact of the speech was considerable. The Senate convened the Tydings committee to examine the charges, which eventually found them to be groundless. Against an effective demagogue such as McCarthy, however, this was ineffective; he simply reformulated his charges slightly and continued making them both in the Senate and to the press.

From 1950 to 1953 McCarthy continued to press his accusations that the government was failing to deal with communism within its ranks, while his overnight stardom gave him a powerful national following and a source of considerable income. His finances were investigated by a senate panel in 1952; its report cited questionable behaviour in his campaigns and irregularities in his finances, but found no grounds for legal action. He married Jean Kerr, a researcher in his office, on September 29, 1953.

After the Republican electoral triumph of 1953 - a triumph his charges assisted; it is probable that the defeat of more than one Democratic candidate for national office in 1953 was due at least in part to accusations against him by McCarthy - the party leadership, recognising his immense popularity and his value as a stick with which to beat liberal Democrats, appointed him chairman of the Permanent Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. His unreliability and evasiveness, however, meant he was never completely trusted by the party (and particularly by President Dwight Eisenhower).

His committee, unlike the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, focused on government institutions. It first made an investigation into bureaucracy at Voice of America, then forced the withdrawal of supposedly pro-communist literature from the State Department overseas information library. Meanwhile, McCarthy continued to make accusations of communist influence within the government, notwithstanding the fact that it was now a Republican government. This angered Eisenhower; he was not willing to oppose McCarthy publically due to his continuing popularity, but he now considered McCarthy a dangerous loose cannon and began behind-the-scenes work to remove him from his position of influence. In the fall of 1953, McCarthy's committee began its ill-fated inquiry into the U.S. Army. It attempted to uncover a spy ring in the Army Signal Corps, but failed. The committee was reduced to persecuting an Army dentist, Irving Peress, who took the Fifth Amendment under sustained questioning. Meanwhile, hostile media attention was focused on the treatment of General Ralph W. Zwicker during the earlier investigation, and on a scandal involving McCarthy's aide, Roy Cohn. It was alleged that McCarthy and Cohn pressured the Army to give favourable treatment to another former aide and friend of Cohn's, David Schine.

As the investigation continued, press coverage became more and more hostile to McCarthy. The Army was by now engaged on a fightback, supported and aided covertly by Eisenhower. The final disaster of the investigation for McCarthy was the now famous riposte by Joseph Welch, the Army's chief attorney, to an attack by McCarthy on one of his team. Welch asked McCarthy "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?"

The hearings came to an ignominious close soon afterwards, and the whole affair prompted a Senate measure to censure McCarthy, passed by 67 votes to 22. After this McCarthy was discredited as a politician, and his influence was effectively neutralised.

McCarthy had always been a heavy drinker, one of the things that had helped him develop amicable relationships with many members of the press. His discrediting in the Senate seems to have caused anger and depression which turned his heavy drinking into full-scale alcoholism. This seems to have aggravated his existing weak health, and caused serious diseases. He finally died of acute hepatitis in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957. He was survived by his wife Jean and their adopted daughter Tierney.