Joseph McCarthy was a junior Republican senator from Wisconsin still in his first term when he delivered the incendiary Lincoln Day speech that rocketed him to political stardom. Tensions between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union had been at a rolling boil since the end of World War II. Speaking on February 9, 1950, before the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, the senator described in apocalyptic terms the “final, all-out battle” between communist atheists and capitalist Christians. The number of people within the Soviet sphere of influence had grown exponentially over just six years, he declared, and the United States might join those ranks if it failed to eliminate communist “enemies from within.” McCarthy then produced a list of 205 names of State Department employees whom he claimed were known communists.
American journalists seized on this allegation. Although McCarthy later changed the number of State Department communists to 57 and again to 81, he succeeded in spreading fear among the public that Soviet operatives had infiltrated the home front to the highest reaches of government. This fear was not new: similar anticommunist sentiments had overtaken the country immediately after World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. For this reason, the hysteria that gripped America in the 1950s has alternately been called the Second Red Scare and the era of “McCarthyism.” But while McCarthy was the most popular fanner of these flames, he was not personally responsible for the conflagration that engulfed the United States.
McCarthy’s claim regarding the uncontrollable expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence between 1944 and 1950—from “180,000,000 people [to] 80,000,000,000 people”—was an exaggerated misquotation of Republican Rep. Richard M. Nixon’s comments to the House of Representatives just weeks earlier. (As was his wont, McCarthy corrected “80,000,000,000” to “800,000,000” after the news cycle reported on his original figure.) Nixon had implored the House to consider the policy implications of having compromised government employees in positions of influence. He was referring to Alger Hiss, a top-level State Department official who had recently been convicted of perjury after a sensational investigation into his subversive pro-Soviet activities. Hiss’s 1950 conviction came in the wake of major tectonic shifts in the global political landscape. In addition to the Soviet-aligned Eastern Bloc behind the Iron Curtain that formed in the latter half of the 1940s, communists had seized control of China in 1949, and communism threatened to overtake the Korean peninsula as well. The lengthy Hiss investigation and trials thus stoked existing fears across America that the United States was the U.S.S.R.’s next target and that the threat was hiding on the home front in plain sight.
In 1948 Nixon and Karl E. Mundt sponsored legislation that would mandate the government registration of all Communist Party USA members. It passed the House overwhelmingly by a vote of 319 to 58, but it floundered in the Senate. The influential conservative Democrat Sen. Patrick A. McCarran then sponsored an omnibus bill that absorbed the Mundt-Nixon provisions. It additionally incorporated a measure permitting the emergency detention of communist subversives. Despite its questionable constitutionality, the McCarran Act passed the Senate in September 1950 by a vote of 70 to 7. Disgusted, Pres. Harry S. Truman vetoed it, but the veto was overridden by both chambers of Congress.
Widespread congressional support for both the Mundt-Nixon bill and the McCarran Act reflected the tenor of American discourse about communism in the late 1940s. The country was on edge after a series of international and domestic events pointing to communist subversion as a serious national security threat. Members of Congress and senators from both major parties were loath to appear soft on subversive behaviour and arrived at a consciously repressive approach to silencing ideological dissenters. They did so quite independently of McCarthy. “McCarthyism,” then, is something of a misnomer. Rather than causing the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy brought existing fears to a crescendo.