“McCarthyism”

   “McCarthyism” was the name given to campaigns led by the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy to root out communist sympathizers and agents in government, particularly the State Department. Although McCarthyism proper began with his infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, in which he declared he had a list of names of known communist agents working in the State Department, the anticommunist hysteria had already begun in 1947 with the hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee in Hollywood, California, and in the case of Alger Hiss. McCarthyism provided easy answers to such questions as why America “lost” China to the communists and how the Soviet Union was able to develop its own atomic bomb. The mood was sustained by the outbreak of the Korean War and McCarthy’s own adept use of the media. The McCarran Internal Security Act in 1950 was intended to identify subversives, and McCarran’s investigation of people like John Stewart Service in 1951 also was aimed at identifying “loyalty risks.” The publication of Red Channels (1950) and the blacklisting of people named as communist sympathizers, ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Aaron Copland to Edward G. Robinson to Orson Welles merely added to the hysteria. However, the army hearings in which McCarthy was exposed before huge television audiences and the conclusion of the Korean War brought an end to the more extreme aspects of what many described as a “witch hunt”—the inspiration for Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch hunts, The Crucible in 1953.

   See also Blacklist; Cinema; Federal Loyalty Program; Hollywood Ten; Lattimore, Owen.