A decade of fear: how 'McCarthyism' turned American against American in the decade after World War II.

• Author: Roberts, Sam
• Position: TIMES PAST - Senator Joseph McCarthy

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ON FEBRUARY 9, 1950, a relatively obscure United States Senator from Wisconsin delivered a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.

Interest in the speech was so low--after all, Senator Joseph McCarthy had only recently been voted by the capital press corps as the worst Senator in Washington--that no audio recording was made.

But according to a local newspaper the next day, McCarthy dropped a bombshell: "The State Department is infested with Communists," he said. "I have here in hand a list of 205--a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

With the U.S. locked in a tense Cold War with the Soviet Union, news of McCarthy's accusation against the State Department of President Harry Truman sent shock waves across the nation. It catapulted McCarthy to national prominence overnight, and eventually made his name synonymous with a decade-long period of investigations--labeled "witch hunts" by his critics--to uncover Communist infiltration in American life.

In fact, the government's efforts to stem the spread of Communism at home began well before McCarthy's rise. In 1917, soon after the Bolshevik revolution that would turn Russia into the Soviet Union, thousands of alleged Communists in the U.S. were arrested and deported (see Timeline, p. 18) during what became known as the Red Scare.

By the end of World War II in 1945, the Soviet Union controlled most of Eastern Europe and installed Communist puppet regimes in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and East Germany.

In 1947, President Truman, in response to critics who said his administration wasn't being tough enough in containing Communism, ordered "loyalty investigations" of executive-branch employees. The same year, Congress began a high-profile investigation of Hollywood, and the House Un-American Activities Committee won the studios' cooperation in seeking to purge the movie industry of people whose Communist sympathies might influence popular films. The result was the Hollywood "blacklist."

Fear of Communist infiltration intensified in 1949 when Communists led by Mao Zedong took control of China and the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb--well before some American scientists had estimated they would have the expertise to do so. That raised suspicions that Soviet spies had stolen the technology from the U.S.

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THE SOVIET THREAT

Anxiety over a possible Soviet nuclear attack manifested itself in many ways, from talk of apocalyptic nuclear devastation to weekly air-raid drills that sent schoolchildren cowering under their desks or into fallout shelters.

As if an air raid wasn't enough to worry about, anybody, it seemed, could be a spy seeking to undermine American values by infiltrating civic institutions and the government--from local school boards to the White House itself.

A month before McCarthy's speech, a former Assistant Secretary of State, Alger Hiss, was convicted of perjury after denying that he was a Communist spy, lending credence to the idea that Washington itself could be compromised. (Most, but not all, historians believe Hiss was indeed a spy.)

What McCarthy actually said in Wheeling in February 1950 is not known for sure--the Senator later maintained that he had alleged 57 Communists worked in the State Department, not 205--but during this period, many Americans were inclined to believe the worst, even without evidence.

In fact, McCarthy never publicly revealed any list of alleged Communists. The basis for his specific claims of Communist subversion appeared to have been an investigation by the State...