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Joseph R. McCarthy

1908–1957

 

The senator who led the campaign to root out Reds from the public service and other areas of American life was in his day seen as a dangerous threat to American civil liberties.  This remains true, but there were other dimensions to the senator from Wisconsin.  He remains perhaps the most controversial Irish-American politician of recent times, having given his name to a particular brand of free-wheeling vitriolic political activity.

      Joe McCarthy was born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, on 14th November 1908.  His family were Catholics of mixed Irish and German origins.  His early education was in the public school system, at Underhill County School rather than the parish system.  Having worked on a farm, he started his own chicken farm.  Then, at nineteen, he moved to Manawa, enrolled in Little Wolf High School, paying his way by working in a grocery store and ushering in a theatre.  Ambitious, he was also bright, for he completed the four-year-school course in one.

      In 1930 he entered Marquette University to study engineering, but changed to the law school, graduating in 1935.  He was then in private practice as lawyer until he was elected circuit court judge of the tenth district in 1939, and he remained a judge until his election to the US Senate in 1945.  Between 1942 and 1944 he fought with the US Marines in the South Pacific.

      The war had been won by a grand alliance of the western democracies and the Soviet Union.  After the way and the occupation of Eastern Europe, and the establishment of Communist regimes in the countries under the control of the Soviets, this alliance changed into a cold war.  An iron curtain, in Winston Churchill's famous phrase, divided Europe.

      In 1946 McCarthy was elected to the Senate, and served there until his death.  In his first year as senator, McCarthy took up what he saw as the challenge of the penetration of members of the Communist party into the government and other areas of American life.  In this he had the support of a section of the Republican Party, led by Robert A. Taft.  In 1950, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he levelled the charge that the Communist presence in the State Department was influencing American foreign policy.  This was followed up by a hearing of the Tydings Committee.

      The House Un-American Activities Committee, also active at this date, gave rise to alarming notions, though President Harry Truman dismissed these as red herrings.  Yet some two million federal employees were investigated, 526 of whom resigned and 98 were dismissed.  In 1948 twelve Communists were tried for attempting to overthrow the government.

      Under Truman, McCarthy attacked George C. Marshall, then secretary of state and creator of the Marshall Plan, to aid the recovery of post-war Europe - a plan deeply resented by many conservative Americans.

      Others such as Asian adviser Owen Lattimore, who had been involved in policy in the Far East, were also suspect.  A narrow test of loyalty was espoused that focused on attitudes to the alliance with the Soviets during the Second World War.

      In 1950, the beginning of the Korean War and the conviction of Alger Hiss, the country was alive to the Communist menace.  Alger Hiss, a State department official, was accused by Whittaker Chambers of passing documents to communist spies or agents, which he denied.  Hiss was convicted, not of espionage, but of perjury, and the matter remains deeply controversial to this day.  J. Edgar Hoover announced that there were fifty-five thousand party members in the United States and some five hundred thousand sympathizers and fellow-travellers, that is those non-communists whose radical sympathies for the poor and oppressed in America were traded upon by communists for the advantage of the party.  HUAC had records of 750,000 'subversives'.

      The election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who took office in 1953) led to increased government resistance to McCarthy and his methods.  On 2nd January a report by a Senate privileges committee on the activities of the senator found that some had been 'motivated by self-interest'.  McCarthy's investigation of the army, conducted in hearings from 23rd April to 17th June 1954, came at a time when he was already losing influence in Washington and the Eisenhower administration was following a line more or less like that of Truman.  These hearings were televised, and the counsel for the army, John G. Adams, dramatically defeated McCarthy's charges.

      These hearings led the army to charge that McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn had attempted to obtain special privileges of leave for a committee aide (with whom, it seems, Cohn was sexually involved) who had been drafted into the army as a private.  This was controversial and unpleasant material, though not fully aired at the time.

      Eventually the Republican Party distanced itself from McCarthy, and he was censured by the Senate.  The censure resolution was passed on 30th July 1954, and in a vote of a special session of the Senate on 2nd December he was condemned for his conduct in chairing the Senate committees.

      His early death in Washington, D.C., on 2nd May 1957 - he was only forty-eight - did not, however, end the right-wing attack on either American liberal policies or Communists in places of influence.  McCarthy had achieved a large following among conservatives of all religions and had a large Irish-Catholic following.  His influence was immense and remained so.

      McCarthy's extravagant style reflected the intense patriotism of an Irish American deeply anxious to prove his loyalty and that of his part of the community by focusing on the disloyalty of another one.  A generation before, much of what he said about Communist America had been said about the Irish themselves as agents of papal power attempting to subvert American democracy.  That had not been true, and for many, Senator McCarthy's claims also belong to what has been characterized as 'the paranoid style' of American politics.

      With the fall of the Soviet Union and further investigations by historians, the actual extent of Communist influence has become clear.  Paranoid though McCarthy was, the American Communist party had nevertheless infiltrated many areas of American life as a matter of policy.

      Yet even today, when communism has disappeared as a force in international politics, and so long after his death, Joseph Raymond McCarthy remains a model of a particular kind of American patriot for a significant number of Americans.  As the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman points out, he introduced into public life a notion that all men were suspect, and therefore engendered a culture of total security at all levels of public and private life that has become the great obsession of modern times.  This shows, adds von Hoffman, that 'the view championed by Joe [McCarthy], that the world is a perilous place penetrated by treachery and poised to attack, has gained wide acceptance'.