Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy was a prominent and controversial figure in American politics during the early to mid-20th century. Born in 1908 into a poor Irish-German farming family, he faced early hardships but developed an industrious spirit that helped him succeed in various endeavors, including law and politics. After serving in the Marines during World War II, McCarthy transitioned to a political career, initially as a judge and later as a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. His ascent to national prominence began in 1950 when he capitalized on public fears of communism, making unsubstantiated allegations of communist infiltration in the U.S. government.
McCarthy became synonymous with a period known as "McCarthyism," characterized by aggressive investigations and a climate of fear surrounding suspected communists. His tactics often involved making sensational accusations without substantial evidence, which garnered both fervent support and significant opposition. The televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 marked a turning point, exposing his bullying methods and leading to a sharp decline in his public approval. Ultimately, McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954, and he struggled with health and personal issues until his death in 1957. His legacy remains a subject of debate, with discussions focusing on his motives, methods, and the lasting impact of his actions on American political life and civil liberties.
Subject Terms
Joseph McCarthy
Politician
- Born: November 14, 1908
- Birthplace: Grand Chute, near Appleton, Wisconsin
- Died: May 2, 1957
- Place of death: Bethesda, Maryland
American senator (1947-1957)
McCarthy was the key figure in what came to be labeled “McCarthyism” a national furor of divisive concern and suspicion regarding alleged communists in American government. For four years, he was a dominant figure in American political life, striking fear into his opponents and confusion into the public mind.
Area of achievement Government and politics
Early Life
Joseph Raymond McCarthy was the fifth child of Tim McCarthy, a farmer of Irish-German background, and Bridget Tierney McCarthy, of Irish stock. The family was devoutly Roman Catholic and poor. Despite some conflict, the family members remained close to one another throughout McCarthy’s life.
As the youngest son, and an ungainly one at that, McCarthy was subject to some mistreatment by his brothers, worked hard by his father, and doted on by his mother. McCarthy early developed his lifelong traits of combativeness, respect for hard work, and extroversion. He attended the local public school only until age fourteen.
McCarthy’s interests were not academic, however, nor were they agricultural. He wanted to escape his family’s traditional poverty and do so in a manner that would make him independent of the rest of the family. He first worked at farming, then, at age sixteen, he began his own chicken business, which prospered for a while but ultimately failed. At age twenty, McCarthy left his hometown to manage a grocery store in Manawa, Wisconsin. By virtue of extremely hard work and real promotional talent, he did very well in the grocery business. While working full-time as a grocer, he also completed in only one year’s time the four years of high school he had missed.
McCarthy then moved on to Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he majored in law. Never scholarly or intellectual, he thrived by dint of industriousness and a prodigious memory, which left him able to ignore work until the last minute and then to cram successfully. He had numerous jobs while at the university and also augmented his income with gambling, particularly poker, at which he was extremely aggressive and successful. He was also an active amateur boxer, ungraceful but determined, bullying his way past opponents.
Following his graduation in 1935, McCarthy practiced law and big-money poker in small Wisconsin towns and became active in politics as a pro-New Deal Democrat. In 1939, he was elected to the nonpartisan office of circuit court judge; the campaign was bitter, and McCarthy, though victorious, was accused of dishonesty and questionable tactics. He was an equally controversial and unorthodox judge, but most observers believed that he did a fairly good job at it. McCarthy held on to his judicial position when he entered the Marines in 1942.
McCarthy’s military career is a source of much controversy, since he made his military prowess (as “Tail Gunner Joe”) such a key part of his later political campaigns. He may have had some combat experience, but most of it was surely invented, with a view toward its future political usefulness. He went on leave in 1944, to seek the Republican senatorial nomination (when he became a Republican is not clear, but he realized that his prospects were clearly better, in the mid-1940’s, in the Republican Party). He failed in that year, but tried again in 1946, when he narrowly defeated longtime Republican senator Robert M. La Follette for the nomination and then easily won the general election.
Life’s Work
The early years of McCarthy’s Senate career were undistinguished. Beyond gaining a reputation for brashness and general unscrupulousness, he made little impression on his colleagues or on the press. At the start of 1950, however, facing the likelihood of not being reelected in the 1952 campaign, he took up the increasingly popular issue of communists in government. The reasons for his adopting this issue, and the degree to which he was sincere about it, remain unclear. The era started with his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, Lincoln’s Day speech, which alleged that 205 federal employees were “known to the Secretary of State . . . who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” Before it ended, more than four years later, he had become one of the most powerful figures in American national life.
Within a few months of the Wheeling speech, McCarthy was a national figure. Dismissed by many in government and the press as a charlatan, he also had numerous supporters among political conservatives and a general public that was truly impressed with the communist danger to American influence and institutions. Soviet atomic power, the fall of Chiang Kai-shek in China, and the coming of the Korean War in mid-1950 all contributed to a mood of apprehension.
Working from his position on previously unimportant senate committees, McCarthy used his shrewd sense of public relations to exploit these fears, in the process focusing attention on himself. By accusing his senatorial opponents and press critics such as Drew Pearson of communist sympathies, he gradually silenced criticism. When questions were raised relative to the substance of his charges, McCarthy would respond, not with evidence, but with even stronger accusations that overwhelmed his opponents and kept his name in the headlines.
In 1951, on the Senate floor, he announced “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.” Included in the alleged conspiracy was George C. Marshall, general of the Army in World War II and secretary of state under President Harry S. Truman. The actual allegations, as was true throughout McCarthy’s career, were nonsubstantive.
McCarthy’s power by 1952 was such that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, running for president, had to swallow his distaste for the senator and support his reelection. McCarthy won renomination and reelection, but the constant tension of his career was beginning to affect him. His health was not good, and he was drinking constantly and heavily.
The pressure was now on McCarthy to provide substantive proof of the charges he had been making for more than two years or else lose his influence. He had the advantage of chairing the Committee on Government Operations, whose Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations he could use for the furthering of his personal interests. From this vantage point, McCarthy began the extremely emotional investigations of subversion in government that brought him to the pinnacle of his power and then led to his downfall.
In 1953, McCarthy began with highly publicized and televised investigations of two branches of the International Information Agency the Voice of America and the Overseas Library Program alleging subversion and “un-Americanism” in both. He then began his attack on the U.S. Army, in his fall, 1953, investigation of the Army Signal Corps. Also in the fall of 1953, the bachelor senator married his longtime aide, Jean Kerr.
The Eisenhower administration, finding the senator’s attacks increasingly dubious and hurtful to the administration, was frequently trying to persuade Senator McCarthy to let up on his attacks on public figures, but to no avail. McCarthy’s opponents began, also, to counterattack, especially in the case of favors allegedly exacted from the Army for G. David Schine, a friend of the McCarthy committee’s general counsel, Roy Cohn, and an unpaid aide on the senator’s staff.
McCarthy was not dissuaded by either persuasion or confrontation, and he continued on the attack, most notably in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. In these hearings, with the Army ably represented by private attorney Joseph N. Welch, McCarthy suffered the severest defeat of his career. The national television audience saw both sides, in effect, on trial, but McCarthy was the focus of the whole affair. His coarseness, bullying tactics, and lack of meaningful evidence for his manifold charges came across convincingly. More and more of those who had been afraid to oppose McCarthy previously now did so. Most important, this included members of the Eisenhower administration. The senator’s public approval rating also dropped precipitously. The hearings were a disaster for him.
By August, 1954, the Senate was holding hearings relative to a censure of McCarthy. In December, it voted censure by a vote of sixty-seven to twenty-two. McCarthy lost interest in public affairs at this point, neglecting his Senate duties and drinking heavily. His health suffered accordingly. On May 2, 1957, he died.
Significance
There was much debate among contemporaries a debate continued among historians as to McCarthy’s true motives in public life. Overall, scholars agree, he was more of an opportunist than anything else. Lacking intellectual depth and any real ideology, McCarthy ever sought the main chance, which he found, ultimately, in politics. A smaller number of McCarthy defenders, on the other hand, insist that he was sincere in his efforts and was besmirched by a liberal press and intellectual community that was unsympathetic to his aims.
The traits he developed as a youth the capacity for hard work, ambition, deviousness, and brute force of personality served him throughout his life. Ultimately, however, they also defeated him, because there was no real substance to the man or his movement. The problems he addressed were real enough, although there is no hard evidence that their reality or unreality mattered to McCarthy. Rather, they were issues that he could use for his own personal aggrandizement. Thus, the issues were exaggerated and contorted, until they no longer represented real problems or real people. In the process, an entire nation went through anguished soul-searching, bitter suspicion, and animosity. It is difficult to find any national benefit deriving from four years of McCarthy and McCarthyism.
Further Reading
Buckley, William F., Jr., and L. Brent Bozell. McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning. New York: Arlington House, 1954. A generally sympathetic study by two contemporaries; its nature reflects their strong anticommunism. While not entirely uncritical of McCarthy, the authors are most impressed with the reality of the communist menace at the time.
Cohn, Roy. McCarthy. New York: New American Library, 1968. By one of McCarthy’s closest collaborators, the book is both a McCarthy biography and a Cohn autobiography, focusing on the years of their association. Not uncritical, but overall a sympathetic account.
Crosby, Donald F. God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. A study by a Roman Catholic priest, focusing on the interrelationship between McCarthy and McCarthyism, on the one hand, and the Church and the Roman Catholic public, on the other.
Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970. A scholarly study, focusing on McCarthy’s senatorial activities and relations with other members of the Senate. Valuable for understanding the effects of McCarthy and McCarthyism on American political life.
Herman, Arthur. Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator. New York: Free Press, 2000. Biography exploring McCarthy’s life and legacy within the context of newly declassified documents.
Morgan, Ted. Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Random House, 2003. Morgan maintains that McCarthy did not emerge in a vacuum but was part of a long line of Americans who exploited the issue of communism for their own political advantage.
Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. New York: Free Press, 1983. A scholarly biography, well researched and as objective as McCarthy studies are likely to be. Thorough and reasonably complete.
Reeves, Thomas C. The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography. New York: Stein and Day, 1982. The largest and most complete McCarthy biography. Very well researched and extensively annotated. Balanced and fair in its analysis.
Rovere, Richard H. Senator Joe McCarthy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959. The first major McCarthy biography; popular rather than scholarly. Quite anti-McCarthy in tone, but perceptive and valuable for an understanding of the man.
Thomas, Lately. When Even Angels Wept: The Senator Joseph McCarthy Affair A Story Without a Hero. New York: William Morrow, 1973. A journalistic biography, without documentation and bibliography. Well written, informative, and well balanced.