essay on joseph mccarthy

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The Vindication of Joseph McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy is the most unjustly demonized individual in American history.

In February 1950, McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, launched a massive campaign against alleged Communists and Soviet agents working for, and perhaps spying on, the U.S. government. In Senate hearings stretching across much of the first half of the 1950s, he accused numerous U.S. government employees, including many in the State Department, of being Communists or even agents of Soviet Intelligence. He was bitterly opposed by powerful members of the Senate, by numerous high-ranking officials within both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, and by the overwhelming preponderance of the press corps. He was finally censured by the U.S. Senate in December 1954 and died, possibly of effects of alcoholism, several years later. He was forty-eight.

The demonizations, then and now, involve charges that McCarthy lied, badgered, intimidated, victimized innocents, and fanned the flames of a massive anti-Communist hysteria. A typical account of his methods is provided by History.com’s “This Day in History,” which claims, “In widely publicized hearings, McCarthy bullied defendants under cross-examination with unlawful and damaging accusations, destroying the reputations of hundreds of innocent officials and citizens.” 1

The pejorative term “McCarthyism” was coined by his critics to denote “The practice of making accusations of disloyalty, especially of pro-Communist activity, in many instances unsupported by proof or based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence.” 2

Even historians who investigate and expose Soviet espionage penetration of the U.S. government claim that “McCarthy’s charges were, in fact, based on thin evidence” and that he “use[d] anticommunism for partisan purposes.” 3

Finally, some FBI agents who actively pursued Soviet spies join in the chorus of criticism: “I . . . was more interested in countering the activities of the Soviet KGB and GRU. . . . McCarthy’s star chamber proceedings, his lies and overstatements hurt our counterintelligence efforts.” 4

But evidence accumulated from a variety of sources—including Soviet archives—since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s shows that McCarthy’s charges were, in numerous cases, neither false nor hysterical—but correct.

It is time to examine the new evidence objectively and to reassess McCarthy, his activities, and Soviet espionage penetration of the U.S. government. In so doing we perform an act of justice to a wrongly maligned man, gain greater knowledge of the Cold War’s early days, and sound a warning regarding possible espionage within and against the U.S. government by current or future enemies.

To reassess McCarthy accurately requires knowledge of (1) the murderously evil nature of Communism, (2) the massive Soviet espionage penetration of the U.S. government, and (3) the specifics of numerous cases regarding McCarthy’s efforts to expose that espionage.

Regarding the first of these, readers are encouraged to read my recent essay, “The Socialist Holocaust and its American Deniers,” 5 and its sources, especially The Black Book of Communism, which provides data taken, in part, from the files of numerous former Communist regimes, including the Soviets. Suffice it to say here that, worldwide, Communism has been responsible for the murder of one hundred million innocent civilians. 6 More, it has done so in strict adherence to its cardinal principle: Because members of the owning class cruelly exploit members of the working class, the former must be expunged in ruthless class warfare.

Items two and three—Soviet espionage penetration of the U.S. government and details regarding McCarthy’s efforts to expose it—are the focus of this essay.

Soviet Espionage Penetration of the U.S. Government

The Soviets targeted the Communists’ main ideological enemy, the capitalist United States, even during World War II, when the two nations were supposedly allied in a death struggle against fascism. Soviet agents achieved widespread penetration of the American government, spying, stealing secrets, ultimately supplying data enabling Stalin’s blood-drenched regime to develop an atomic weapon years earlier than otherwise.

The story reads like a spy thriller.

A good place to begin is in 1937–38 when an American Communist and courier for the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) named Whittaker Chambers (Soviet code-name “Karl”) decided to drop out of espionage. Over time, Chambers had grown appalled by Stalin’s mass murder and by the reaction of the American Communist Party (CPUSA)—which blindly followed the Soviet line. 7

Fearful for his life and that of his wife, Chambers retained copies of stolen State Department documents, which he termed his “life preserver.” These papers came from several valued sources—one of whom was Chambers’s friend and a fellow American Communist. Chambers hid the material with his wife’s nephew—and he and his family dropped out of sight. 8

The primary source (and friend) was State Department official Alger Hiss. 9

In 1939, when the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with National Socialist Germany, thereby becoming an ally of Hitler, Chambers became convinced that the Soviet Union was a dangerous enemy whose espionage activities should be revealed to American counterintelligence. Anti-Communist journalist Isaac Don Levine arranged for him to meet Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle, FDR’s top adviser regarding internal security. 10

Berle’s notes show that he appreciated Chambers’s emphasis on espionage against the United States, not merely on covert association with the CPUSA. Berle made a list of U.S. government employees Chambers named as Soviet agents. These individuals included, among others, State Department official Hiss (“Lawyer,” “Ales”), Treasury Department official Harry Dexter White (“Richard”), and an assistant to President Roosevelt, Lauchlin Currie (“Page”). 11

But FDR brusquely rebuffed Berle’s mention to him of Chambers’s allegations (this at a time when the Soviets were allied with Hitler), 12 and Berle did not send his notes of the meeting with Chambers to the FBI until 1943. 13

In the meantime, while U.S counterintelligence idled, Stalin’s agents engaged in massive espionage against America. As but three examples:

1. The Nathan Silvermaster group : Silvermaster (“Pal”) was a Treasury Department official who headed a spy network that included both Currie and White, as well as George Silverman (“Eleron”), an analyst for the U.S. Army Air Force, who provided information regarding American military aviation; Frank Coe (“Pick,” “Peak”), director of the division of monetary research in the Treasury Department; and Solomon Adler (“Sax”), the Treasury Department’s representative in China. Coe, Adler, and White aided the Communist cause by using their authority to delay delivery of a large Congressionally approved gold loan to China’s Nationalist government, then fighting Mao Tse-tung’s forces. The delay caused China’s monetary unit to depreciate in value, and the ensuing inflation undercut public support for the Nationalist government, hindering its fight against Communism. 14

2. The Victor Perlo group : Perlo (“Raid”) was a senior economist in the War Production Board, supervising U.S. military industrial production. His group included several Soviet sources. One of them, Harold Glasser (“Ruble”), was a senior Treasury Department economist. Another, Charles Kramer (“Mole”), was a U.S. congressional staff member. A third, Duncan Lee (“Kokh”), was a lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, and an aide to its director, William Donovan. 15

3. Atomic bomb espionage : Although U.S. counterintelligence efforts were more stringent to protect the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis, they were risibly lax regarding Communists. As one example, J. Robert Oppenheimer, known since late-1942 to the FBI as a secret member of the CPUSA, was appointed scientific/administrative head of the atom bomb project. 16 This decision, in light of Oppenheimer’s expertise and the fact that he was not actively cooperating with Soviet Intelligence, was perhaps a risk worth taking. Nevertheless, Soviet intelligence agents permeated the Manhattan Project.

Klaus Fuchs (“Rest”), a German physicist, Communist, and major contributor to the Manhattan Project, supplied the Soviets important information regarding “Enormoz,” Soviet code name for the project. 17 Likewise, Theodore Hall (“Mlad”), a young American physicist and Communist, was a valuable source of information. 18 Above all, there was the spy ring headed by Julius Rosenberg (“Liberal”), an American engineer, Communist, and a longtime agent of Soviet Intelligence. Rosenberg induced his wife’s brother, David Greenglass (“Bumblebee”), an American Communist and machinist working on the “Enormoz” project in New Mexico, to pass along secrets to their Soviet spymasters. 19

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, two leading experts on Soviet espionage, concluded: “[N]umerous secret Communists and Soviet sympathizers eagerly volunteered to deliver American military, technological, and diplomatic secrets to Stalin.” 20

During the war years, American counterintelligence assets necessarily were focused on defeating fascism. Nevertheless, it is shocking how slowly American efforts unfolded against Stalin’s espionage barrage, especially given that from August 1939 until June 1941, the Soviets and Nazis were allies.

As but one example of American laxity, in 1944, Katherine Perlo, Victor’s ex-wife, sent a letter to President Roosevelt exposing Perlo’s espionage activities against the U.S. government and naming names. We know today that the Justice Department received her letter. But it was “ignored both by those in the White House assigned to security matters and by American counter-intelligence agents.” 21

It was not until 1945, after the war had ended, that two momentous events finally shocked U.S. counterintelligence into activity against the Soviets.

The first was the defection in Canada of Igor Gouzenko, a code clerk for the GRU. He brought with him GRU documents supporting his claims about Soviet espionage. At first, Canadian authorities paid no attention; but, eventually, numerous Canadian Communists were tried, convicted, and incarcerated for espionage, including a Communist Party Member of Parliament. 22

Although Gouzenko’s information referred largely to Canadian spies, he also provided data regarding atomic bomb espionage and claimed that an assistant to the U.S. secretary of state was a GRU agent—a likely reference to Alger Hiss. After several weeks of his testimony, the Canadian prime minister flew to D.C. to brief President Truman.

The Gouzenko case thrust Soviet espionage to the forefront of American awareness. His documents established how deeply Soviet agents had penetrated Western governments, American as well as Canadian. 23

But the case that most effectively augmented the termination of Soviet espionage was that of Elizabeth Bentley (“Myrna”). She and her former boss, Jacob Golos (“Sound”), ran a network of sources for Soviet intelligence. In October 1945, fearful of both FBI identification and KGB assassination, Bentley approached the FBI and turned state’s evidence. Her biographer, Kathryn Olmsted, wrote, “In the end, she would sign a 107-page statement naming more than eighty alleged Soviet spies in the United States.” 24

Many of those Bentley named were individuals she knew personally and who had previously been identified as Soviet agents by Chambers and Katherine Perlo. 25 One shadowy contact of Golos’s she engaged sparingly, and knew only as “Julius,” turned out to be of immense importance. Her physical description matched that of Julius Rosenberg, although it took the FBI five more years to identify his key role in Soviet atomic espionage. 26 Further, one of her sources, Charles Kramer, had informed her that the GRU had a prominent agent in the State Department named “Hiss.” 27

Although it took years to clear out the rat’s nest of Soviet agents in the U.S. government, Bentley’s confession was the beginning of the end for them. A few were indicted, convicted, and incarcerated. Alger Hiss, in 1950, was convicted of perjury regarding denial of handing copies of government documents to Chambers. 28 He served three years in a federal penitentiary.

The initial evidence upon which Hiss was convicted is, in itself, damning. For example, Chambers testified under oath that he personally knew Hiss to be a GRU agent in the 1930s. Hede Massing (“Redhead”), another Soviet agent turned state’s evidence, similarly testified under oath that she personally knew Hiss to be a Soviet agent. Chambers produced his “life preserver,” copies of stolen State Department documents, some written in Hiss’s handwriting and some typed on Hiss’s personal typewriter. 29

But today we have additional evidence culled from Soviet, Hungarian, Czechoslovak, and American archives, all pointing—despite Hiss’s lifelong protestations of innocence—to his culpability. 30

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried, convicted, and executed for their role in providing the Soviets information regarding the atomic bomb. The testimony of Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, was part of a strong case built by prosecutors establishing Julius Rosenberg as the leader of a spy ring determined to provide the Soviets with U.S. data regarding the atom bomb. The case against Ethel was weaker, and many, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, resisted imposition of the death penalty on her. But the year was 1951, and Judge Samuel Kaufman, alarmed by the Communist invasion of South Korea, and by a Soviet Union now armed with nuclear weapons, nevertheless imposed that penalty. 31

In this case, too, later evidence, emerging after the collapse of the Soviet Union, corroborated the culpability of Julius Rosenberg. The strongest is a book by KGB officer Alexander Feklisov (“Kalistrat”), an unreconstituted Communist and supporter of the Soviet cause, who provided information regarding his personal supervision of the Rosenberg spy ring, portraying them as heroes and martyrs in a noble quest. 32

Nevertheless, most American agents of Soviet Intelligence never suffered legal penalty. Instead, under remorseless FBI pressure, many either resigned from or were forced out of U.S. government employment.

McCarthy’s Critics

Even today, some of McCarthy’s critics deny the extent, or even the existence, of Soviet espionage on the part of CPUSA members. But given the evidence now available, this position is impossible to uphold honestly. Evidence from numerous sources definitively establishes a massive Soviet espionage barrage, employing numerous CPUSA partisans, against the United States government.

One such source is the Soviet archives, from which much information has been culled. Another is the Venona Project, a top-secret World War II enterprise in which U.S. Military Intelligence agents—distrusting Stalin—cracked the Soviet code and, for several years, decrypted and read numerous Soviet cables; Venona was declassified by President Clinton in 1995. A third is a trove of FBI files made accessible under the Freedom of Information Act.

But McCarthy’s most knowledgeable critics have never denied Soviet espionage. Rather, they always claimed (and still do) that by the time McCarthy burst onto the anticommunist public scene in 1950, the purge of Soviet agents and identified Communists at State and other government bureaus was complete. All McCarthy could do, and did, they claim, in order to make a name for himself was smear and ruin the reputation of scads of innocent persons. This charge, in 2016, remains the conventional wisdom regarding McCarthy.

In truth, one part of this charge is accurate: By 1950, most Soviet agents and many identified Communists had been allowed to resign quietly from U.S. government employment. 33

But most is not all. Were there still Soviet agents and known Communists working for U.S. government agencies? Before answering this question, several important points must be made, establishing a context.

Important Background Truths

Desiring to protect the reputations of those not yet proven to be Communists or Soviet spies, McCarthy did not name names in public hearings. 34 For example, he would bring to the attention of the Senate and/or the public details of case number 17, seeking to show Communist loyalties without divulging the individual’s name. In the absence of knowing the individual’s identity, it was exceedingly difficult for journalists or historians to fact-check the specific accusations. Related, some of McCarthy’s hearings were held in executive session, records of which were sealed by the Senate for fifty years, not opened to the public until 2003.

Today, from some of the above sources, especially FBI files, we know the identities of the parties involved as well as a great deal of the security intel then available on them. We know, therefore, what McCarthy knew.

Second, strongly suspected in McCarthy’s day and known with absolute certainty in ours, the CPUSA was controlled from Moscow and was an instrument of Soviet policy. 35 For example, when the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler, the CPUSA continued to take orders from Moscow and opposed U.S. aid to those battling Nazi Germany. Haynes and Klehr, based on extensive research in Soviet archives, wrote, “The essence of American communism was loyalty to Stalin.” 36

Third, hundreds of CPUSA members worked for and spied on the U.S. government, reporting information to Soviet Intelligence. 37 Haynes and Klehr noted, there were “hundreds of American Communists who abetted Soviet espionage . . . the party chief himself [Earl Browder (“Helmsman”)] knowingly and purposely assisted Soviet spies . . . espionage was a regular activity of the American Communist Party.” 38

CPUSA membership on the part of U.S. government employees, although not prima facie evidence of spying, meant loyalty not to the United States but to the Soviet Union—and it meant the distinct possibility of spying. In brief, CPUSA membership by government officials constituted a substantial security risk.

McCarthy sought merely to remove such individuals from government employment—not to incarcerate them in Leavenworth, nor deny them employment in innocuous private-sector jobs unrelated to defense or government secrets, nor to hound or besmirch them in perpetuity—but only to fire them from their government posts.

McCarthy had the funny idea that neither Soviet agents nor known Communists should be working for the U.S. government.

McCarthy’s Cases

In February 1950, when McCarthy launched his public crusade, were there still extensive security breaches within the U.S. government and/or cognate intergovernmental agencies, involving Soviet agents, known Communists, or suspected Communists?

The answer is unequivocally “yes.”

In May 1950, for example, as public furor over McCarthy’s efforts swelled, Soviet agent Solomon Adler (“Sax”) was still employed at the Treasury Department. It was only now that he fled, first to his native England, but eventually to his true homeland, Communist China, where he faithfully served the Mao Tse-tung regime that he had helped instate. 39 Adler had been identified as a Soviet agent by both Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, 40 a charge later confirmed by research into Soviet archives. 41

William Remington was case number 19 on McCarthy’s initial Senate presentation. Remington had been identified by federal sleuths as an active Communist while in college and when subsequently working for the Tennessee Valley Authority. He had been named as a Soviet agent by Elizabeth Bentley, 42 to whom he had passed information regarding airplane production. 43 Eventually he was tried, convicted, and incarcerated for perjury regarding his involvement in the CPUSA. 44 After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a recovered KGB memo listed Remington, among forty-two others, as Soviet spies likely exposed by Bentley to U.S. authorities. 45 In 1950, he was working for the U.S. Commerce Department. 46

Annie Lee Moss is often portrayed as the quintessential McCarthy victim. She was a black woman, seemingly frail, who had been employed as a cafeteria worker. She denied any involvement with the CPUSA. But FBI agent Mary Markward, who, starting in 1942 and continuing for seven years as a deep cover spy inside the CPUSA, had identified Moss as a CPUSA member; and the FBI shared this information with other government agencies. Despite this, in 1950, she obtained a post as code clerk for the U.S. Army Signal Corps and received appropriate security clearance, handling sensitive material, some of it in plain text. She was still at this position when McCarthy investigated her in 1954.

She claimed a case of mistaken identity, arguing that three women named “Annie Lee Moss” were in the Washington, D.C., phone directory. Her claim was false—there was an “Anna Lee Moss,” an “Annie Moss,” and an “Annie L. Moss,” the last being the woman in question. More to the point, the Annie Lee Moss who was a code clerk for the Army and who was called before McCarthy’s committee had been described by Markward as a cafeteria worker, had lived for a time with a Hattie Griffin, and received the Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper. The Moss testifying to McCarthy’s committee acknowledged she had been a cafeteria worker, had lived with Hattie Griffin, and received the Daily Worker. Finally, she professed having lived at 72 R Street, an address that matched FBI records regarding her place of residence.

The FBI—and McCarthy—had the right Annie Lee Moss. Far from being an innocent victim, she was a CPUSA member working for the U.S. government, handling confidential material. 47

Frank Coe (“Pick,” “Peak,”), like Adler, had helped retard U.S. aid to Chiang Kai-shek, thereby abetting the Communist cause in China. In 1950, he worked for the International Monetary Fund, an intergovernmental agency founded in large part by his former superior at the Treasury Department, Harry Dexter White, who was also a Soviet agent. 48 In that year, American pressure finally forced him out. Coe was called to testify at the McCarthy hearings regarding his work for the Communist cause and pleaded the Fifth Amendment. In 1958, he moved permanently to Communist China, working there for Mao’s regime. In 1959, he wrote essays supporting a “massive Maoist purge of Chinese society”—euphemism for mass murder—claiming that indoctrination in Marxist-Leninist theory had substantially increased Chinese economic production. 49 Like Adler, Coe had been identified as a Soviet apparatchik by both Chambers and Bentley, 50 accusations later confirmed by Venona decrypts. 51

McCarthy’s 1953 investigation into security laxity at Fort Monmouth—a network of labs spread among several New Jersey towns—revealed egregious leaks of confidential information. Anti-aircraft systems, missile detection, radar, and other advanced electronics for the military were researched there. Security personnel at Monmouth repeatedly had reported their suspicions to U.S. government superiors but been persistently overruled. 52

Because of such laxity, substantial amounts of classified information were stolen and transmitted to the Soviets. As one example, a McCarthy staffer tracked down (in West Germany) an East German defector, a technician named Harald Buettner, who signed a notarized statement swearing that, when employed at a Soviet scientific installation in 1950, he had witnessed stolen material from Fort Monmouth. 53 Further, subsequent to McCarthy’s hearings, a Soviet defector (“Andrivye”) informed congressional investigators that vast amounts of information pertaining to U.S. radar had been smuggled into Soviet hands, largely from Monmouth. 54

Finally, a U.S. Army Intelligence officer acknowledged that “our latest Signal Corps developments were appearing in the hands of the North Korean Communists” 55 —and, presumably, aiding them in killing U.S. military personnel during the Korean War.

How did this happen? For one thing, numerous employees at Monmouth treated confidential secrets as personal property, reproducing documents and then taking them home. “Literally thousands of official papers . . . had gone missing from the complex.” 56 Further, the CPUSA had established a group in the Monmouth vicinity named the Shore Club, including former Monmouth employees, whose purpose, according to substantial testimony, was to pry information out of Monmouth. 57

Monmouth crawled with suspects. Aaron Coleman, for example, a childhood schoolmate of subsequently convicted Soviet agents Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell, 58 admitted having attended a Young Communist League meeting with Rosenberg, and Rosenberg himself claimed to have had contact with him while at Monmouth. Coleman was one of many Monmouth employees in the habit of taking home classified documents. In 1946, security agents, suspicious of his activities, searched his home and found forty official documents, some of a confidential nature. 59 When McCarthy opened his investigation, Coleman still worked at Monmouth, although on a basis of restricted security, and had open access to workers with security clearance.

Ruth Levine was another suspicious character. She had worked for the Federal Telecommunications Lab (FTL)—a Monmouth affiliate—for a decade, held a top-secret security clearance, and had been accused by former Communist John Saunders (and other witnesses) of belonging to a Communist cell at FTL. Questioned at the hearings whether she belonged to the CPUSA or had ever engaged in espionage, Levine refused to answer, consistently pleading the Fifth Amendment. Because of the McCarthy hearings, Levine was finally sacked from her position at the FTL. 60

Coleman and Levine were merely two major security risks at Monmouth; McCarthy’s hearings identified others. 61

McCarthy, therefore, had abundant reasons to be concerned regarding the security problem at Monmouth. The fiasco is summed up in a public exchange between the senator and Andrew Reid, Monmouth’s longtime security chief. McCarthy: “[H]ave you repeatedly furnished information on individuals who you considered to be very dangerous to the security of this country, and discovered that they were kept on year after year even after you had supplied the complete facts on them?” Reid: “Yes, sir.” 62

In addition to exposing Adler, Remington, Moss, Coe, and the security debacle at Fort Monmouth, McCarthy exposed various instances of severe laxity on the part of the U.S. government. But the foregoing is sufficient to establish the conclusion.

McCarthy may well have been mistaken in some cases; [63] he was a hard-drinking, two-fisted, pugnacious political street fighter; he was, at times, impulsive, sloppy, and loudly bombastic. He was a flawed champion for a noble cause. But in battle after battle after endless security battle—he was right.

The Causes of McCarthy’s Demonization

Why, then, the endless denunciations of McCarthy and the widespread use of the epithet “McCarthyism” as a pejorative? There are several reasons.

One is that, as noted, the full data necessary to assess his cases was locked away in archives of both Cold War adversaries until at least the mid-1990s. It is only in the past twenty years that this information, a little at a time, has become accessible to researchers.

A second is that government agencies did on occasion during this era treat as a crime the mere holding of communist views. This is evident in some of the hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), especially in its investigation of Communists in Hollywood. During this era, Hollywood was rife with CPUSA members and other advocates of communism. But these are not necessarily one and the same. To be a member of the Communist Party during the Cold War was to be an active supporter of America’s enemy, the Soviet Union. Evidence that an American was a member of the CPUSA was legitimate cause for government investigation and, potentially, charges of espionage or treason. But merely advocating communism—or even persuading others to embrace it—is not properly regarded as a crime. It is neither morally nor legally akin to stealing U.S. government secrets, providing them to a military enemy, thereby materially strengthening the enemy and exacerbating the danger to the lives of U.S. citizens.

This critical distinction is often lost on people, and so McCarthy, as an avatar of anticommunism, lends his name to an entire era, including its governmental abuses.

Nevertheless, something still does not add up here. Some other factor is necessary to explain the hysterical anti-McCarthy denunciations and ongoing propaganda.

Why have so many U.S. journalists and intellectuals—from the 1950s and to this day— vehemently denounced McCarthy? Given the information now available, why do so many refuse to acknowledge and publicly discuss the massive Soviet espionage penetration of the U.S. government—and the fact that McCarthy was so often right? Why do journalists and intellectuals persist in virulent outrage against this man?

Clearly, McCarthy struck a nerve in many. But what nerve?

His own words provide a clue: “[Y]ou cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers . . . without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder.” 64 Or, even more forcefully: “[C]o-existence with Communists is neither possible nor honorable nor desirable. Our long-term objective must be the eradication of Communism from the face of the earth.” 65

Whatever his flaws, McCarthy’s principled opposition to Communist totalitarianism represents the essence of his character.

What is the essence of his critics’ character? This is revealed in their words, some of which I discuss in “The Socialist Holocaust and its American Deniers” ( TOS Fall 2016). Here are a few indications:

Regarding American opposition to the Soviet Union, Professor Ellen Schrecker (Yeshiva University) wrote, “the fervid anticommunism of the early Cold War did tap into something dark and nasty in the human soul.” 66

Political historian David Caute argued that “American capitalism, business, free enterprise, prosperity and liberty had little to fear from domestic Communism.” To ascertain “the real sources of the ‘anti-Communist‘ hysteria,” we must “look toward the unassimilated alien, the hyphenated American still carrying the contagion of Old-World Socialism, that creeping, gradualist, Fabian New Dealism, which posed so insidious a threat to unbridled Business, big or small.” 67

Professor Joel Kovel (Bard University) states that “anti-Communism is an exploitation of the deep structures of racism for the purpose of managing threats to capitalist rule.” 68 As Haynes and Klehr explain, according to Kovel, it was not communism but rather American Cold War anticommunism that “plunged the world into a nightmare: ‘millions of innocents lie dead, [and] whole societies have been laid to waste.’” 69

The title of Professor Schrecker’s book— Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America —displays succinctly the assessment of all of these academics, and many more, toward McCarthy.

McCarthy’s major enemies are (for the most part) either supporters of communism or sympathetic to it, or, at the very least, unwilling to recognize its murderous totalitarian nature. This is the dirty little secret of the anti-McCarthy hysteria that continues to permeate both American history texts and contemporary journalistic references to him.

Historians routinely reassess past events on the basis of new evidence. Such work is essential to their profession. A wealth of important and pertinent data has become available during the past twenty years, including McCarthy’s papers, which were unsealed by the Senate in 2003. Where are the scholarly studies finally telling the whole truth about this cruelly demonized figure? Where is the attempt to set right the historic record about this unjustly vilified patriot? Except for the excellent biography Blacklisted by History by journalist M. Stanton Evans, such studies do not exist.

Because of the dirty little secret mentioned above. American journalists and intellectuals have romanticized socialism—full socialism, real socialism—so much that they cannot bring themselves to see that communism is evil and that a man who exposed this evil within the U.S. government is a hero for having done so. They recognize and properly denounce the murderous totalitarianism of race-based socialism (National Socialism, aka Nazism)—but obdurately refuse to do so regarding the equivalent evils of class-based socialism (Communism). Instead, they are unrestrained in their vicious denunciations of the courageous man who typifies and symbolizes American opposition to this murderous creed.

And so, in his day, McCarthy was laid low by his enemies—but not before he did substantial damage to the Communist cause. His enemies continued—and to this day continue—to besmirch his reputation. But despite all they did and do, they cannot expunge the positive aspects of his career.

Evans, the biographer who researched McCarthy most widely and deeply, penned him a fitting epitaph: “In the end he perished, politically and otherwise, in the rubble he pulled down around him. Yet when the final chapter in the conflict with Moscow was written, amid yet another pile of rubble, he was not without his triumph.” 70

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About Andrew Bernstein

Andrew Bernstein holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and taught philosophy for many years at Marist College. He is the author of Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (2010), Capitalist Solutions (2011), Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters (2020), and, most recently, Why Johnny Still Can't Read or Write or Understand Math .

1 . “This Day in History: December 2, 1954, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/mccarthy-condemned-by-senate. Retrieved September 14, 2016.

2 . Dictionary.com. Retrieved September 13, 2016.

3 . John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 40, 1.

4 . Robert Lamphere and Tom Schachtman, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story (London: W. H. Allen, 1987), 137.

5 . Andrew Bernstein, “The Socialist Holocaust and Its American Deniers,” The Objective Standard 11, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 84–94.

6 . Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4.

7 . Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Random House, 1997), 272–79; Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1952), 34–42; Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 44–45 and 46–47. Much of the information in The Haunted Wood is based on research into KGB files, briefly opened in the 1990s. Soviet code names, generally not discovered until years after the early Cold War period, are provided in The Haunted Wood, xi–xviii.

8 . Weinstein, Perjury, 277, 279, and 283.

9 . Chambers, Witness, 40–41; Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 44–45.

10 . Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 47–48.

11 . Weinstein, Perjury, 292–93; John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 90–91. Levine also made a list of those named by Chambers. White’s name appears on his list; it does not show up on Berle’s. Chambers, in his book, lists White as a Soviet agent but believed it possible he had not mentioned him to Berle.

12 . Isaac Don Levine, Eyewitness to History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973), 197–98. Discussed at www.conservapedia.com/Alger_Hiss. Retrieved November 4, 2016.

13 . Weinstein, Perjury, 293.

14 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 66–67.

15 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 67–68.

16 . M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight against America’s Enemies (New York: Crown Forum, 2007), 316–19.

17 . Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 185–90; Lamphere, The FBI-KGB War, 132–60.

18 . Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 195–97.

19 . Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 197–202; Lamphere, The FBI-KGB War, 178–207.

20 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 68.

21 . Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 225–26.

22 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 52–56.

23 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 48–57.

24 . Kathryn Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 100.

25 . Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 94–96.

26 . Lamphere, The FBI-KGB War, 38–39; Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 65.

27 . Olmsted, Red Spy Queen, 100–101.

28 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 119–29.

29 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 92–130.

30 . Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 170–73. In the controversy still surrounding Hiss’s guilt, one undeniable point must be emphasized: “Ales” was a Soviet code name for a State Department official who was a GRU agent. This is usually taken to refer to Hiss. In the unlikely event that Hiss is indeed innocent, then, in justice, his name must be cleared. But then “Ales” refers to some other ranking State Department official spying for the Soviets.

31 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 143–46 and 166–76. The definitive case for the guilt of the Rosenbergs is Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), passim.

32 . Alexander Feklisov and Sergei Kostin, The Man behind the Rosenbergs (New York: Enigma Books, 2004), passim.

33 . Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 128.

34 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 201–4. Given the mythology that McCarthy, in public, recklessly “named names,” thereby smearing the reputations of innocent persons, the truth is shocking: It was McCarthy’s enemies in the Senate who repeatedly called upon him to publicly name names, a procedure McCarthy was extremely reluctant to do. He desired hearings in executive sessions, privately, with thorough investigations into the activities of the suspects to determine whether, in fact, they were Communists and/or Soviet spies. He did not want to go public with names until and unless the guilt of such suspects was established.

35 . John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Kyrill Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 4–12 and passim.

36 . Haynes, Klehr, and Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, 87.

37 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 11; John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Fridrikh Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 4–15, 96–118, 205–26, and passim.

38 . Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 7.

39 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 326–29.

40 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 327; Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 81.

41 . Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 444; Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, 78, 158.

42 . Bentley, whose veracity was widely criticized at the time, was fully vindicated decades later both by information unearthed in Soviet archives and, especially, by declassification of the Venona decrypts. “Venona and these other archival evidence showed that Elizabeth Bentley had told the truth and those she identified as Soviet sources were just what she said they were: spies who had assisted Soviet espionage against the United States.” Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 82–89; quote on 89; Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 163.

43 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 73–74.

44 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 73–79.

45 . Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 79.

46 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 329–30; Haynes and Klehr, Early Cold War Spies, 73–79.

47 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 528–41.

48 . Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 9–10, 138–40.

49 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 42–43; Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 90, 117, 128, and 143–44.

50 . Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 143–44.

51 . Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 143.

52 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 505–6.

53 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 510–11.

54 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 510. Related, KGB spymaster Feklisov (Kalistrat) spoke of an “unknown radar source” in the United States who supplied thousands of pages of secret data to the Soviets; Evans, Blacklisted by History , 510.

55 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 506.

56 . Blacklisted by History , 510.

57 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 506.

58 . For years, Sobell publicly proclaimed his innocence. Finally, in 2008, at age ninety-one, he admitted to the New York Times that, during World War II, he had transmitted U.S. military secrets to the Soviets (Sam Roberts, “Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits to Soviet Spying,” New York Times, September 11, 2008). Earlier, Soviet spymaster Alexander Feklisov had acknowledged Sobell as a Soviet agent (Feklisov, The Man Behind the Rosenbergs, 132). Discussed at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Sobell. Retrieved October 18, 2016.

59 . Evans, Blacklisted by History , 507.

60 . Evans, Blacklisted by History , 509.

61 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 506–9.

62 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 512.

63 . One such instance was his blanket denunciation of General George Marshall, especially ascribing to him pro-Soviet motives. Evans, Blacklisted by History , 411–24.

64 . Norman Graebner, The New Isolationism: A Study in Politics and Foreign Policy since 1950 (New York: Ronald Press, 1956), 227. Quoted in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy. Retrieved September 22, 2016.

65 . Quoted in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy. Retrieved September 22, 2016.

66 . Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 46.

67 . David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Touchstone Books, 1979), 21.

68 . Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anti-Communism and the Making of America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 74, 95, and 233. Quoted in Haynes and Klehr, In Denial, 52.

69 . Haynes and Klehr, In Denial, 52.

70 . Evans, Blacklisted by History, 605.

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Joseph McCarthy

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 22, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the prospect of communist subversion at home and abroad seemed frighteningly real to many people in the United States. These fears came to define–and, in some cases, corrode–the era’s political culture. For many Americans, the most enduring symbol of this “Red Scare” was Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Senator McCarthy spent almost five years trying in vain to expose communists and other left-wing “loyalty risks” in the U.S. government. In the hyper-suspicious atmosphere of the Cold War, insinuations of disloyalty were enough to convince many Americans that their government was packed with traitors and spies. McCarthy’s accusations were so intimidating that few people dared to speak out against him. It was not until he attacked the Army in 1954 that his actions earned him the censure of the U.S. Senate.

The Cold War

In the years after World War II ended, events at home and abroad seemed to many Americans to prove that the “Red menace” was real. In August 1949, for instance, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. Later that year, Communist forces declared victory in the Chinese Civil War and established the People’s Republic of China. In 1950, North Korea’s Soviet-backed army invaded its pro-Western neighbors to the South; in response, the United States entered the conflict on the side of South Korea .

Did you know? Along with the Army-McCarthy hearings, journalist Edward R. Murrow’s exposés of McCarthyism played an important role in the senator’s downfall. On March 9, 1954, millions of Americans watched as the national news program "See It Now" attacked McCarthy and his methods.

At the same time, the Republican-led House Un-American Activities Committee (known as HUAC ) began a determined campaign to extirpate communist subversion at home. HUAC’s targets included left-wingers in Hollywood and liberals in the State Department. In 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required that all “subversives” in the United States submit to government supervision. (President Truman vetoed the Act—he said it “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights”—but a Congressional majority overrode his veto.)

Joseph McCarthy and the Rise of McCarthyism

All of these factors combined to create an atmosphere of fear and dread, which proved a ripe environment for the rise of a staunch anticommunist like Joseph McCarthy. At the time, McCarthy was a first-term senator from Wisconsin who had won election in 1946 after a campaign in which he criticized his opponent’s failure to enlist during World War II while emphasizing his own wartime heroics.

In February 1950, appearing at the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia , McCarthy gave a speech that propelled him into the national spotlight. Waving a piece of paper in the air, he declared that he had a list of 205 known members of the Communist Party who were “working and shaping policy” in the State Department.

The next month, a Senate subcommittee launched an investigation and found no proof of any subversive activity. Moreover, many of McCarthy’s Democratic and Republican colleagues, including President Dwight Eisenhower, disapproved of his tactics (“I will not get into the gutter with this guy,” the president told his aides). Still, the senator continued his so-called Red-baiting campaign.

In 1953, at the beginning of his second term as senator, McCarthy was put in charge of the Committee on Government Operations, which allowed him to launch even more expansive investigations of the alleged communist infiltration of the federal government. In hearing after hearing, he aggressively interrogated witnesses in what many came to perceive as a blatant violation of their civil rights. Despite a lack of any proof of subversion, more than 2,000 government employees lost their jobs as a result of McCarthy’s investigations.

'Have you no sense of decency, sir?'

In April 1954, Senator McCarthy turned his attention to “exposing” the supposed communist infiltration of the armed services. Many people had been willing to overlook their discomfort with McCarthyism during the senator’s campaign against government employees and others they saw as “elites”; now, however, their support began to wane. Almost at once, the aura of invulnerability that had surrounded McCarthy for nearly five years began to disappear.

First, the Army undermined the senator’s credibility by showing evidence that he had tried to win preferential treatment for his aides when they were drafted. Then came the fatal blow: the decision to broadcast the “Army-McCarthy” hearings on national television. The American people watched as McCarthy intimidated witnesses and offered evasive responses when questioned. When he attacked a young Army lawyer, the Army’s chief counsel thundered, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” The Army-McCarthy hearings struck many observers as a shameful moment in American politics.

The Fall of Joseph McCarthy

By the time the hearings were over, McCarthy had lost most of his allies. The Senate voted to condemn him for his “inexcusable,” “reprehensible,” “vulgar and insulting” conduct “unbecoming a senator.” He kept his job but lost his power, and died in 1957 at the age of 48.

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Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods

By Louis Menand

At the start of 1950, Joseph McCarthy’s political future did not look promising. McCarthy had been elected senator from Wisconsin in 1946, after switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and running as a decorated Marine veteran with the nickname Tail Gunner Joe. Even then, he had a reputation as a scofflaw. He had exaggerated his war record. He first ran for Senate (and lost) while he was still in uniform, which was against Army regulations, and he ran his second Senate campaign while he was a sitting judge, a violation of his oath. Questions had been raised about whether he had dodged his taxes and where his campaign funds had come from.

When McCarthy got to Washington, he became known as a tool of business interests, accepting a loan from Pepsi-Cola in exchange for working to end sugar rationing (he paid it back), and money from a construction company in exchange for opposing funding for public housing (which he eventually voted for). He plainly had no ethical or ideological compass, and most of his colleagues regarded him as a troublemaker, a loudmouth, and a fellow entirely lacking in senatorial politesse.

So when, in 1950, Lincoln’s birthday came around, a time of year when the Republican Party traditionally sent its elected officials out to speak at fund-raisers around the country, McCarthy was assigned to venues where it was clearly hoped that he would attract little notice. His first stop was the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club, in Wheeling, West Virginia, then a diehard Democratic state.

McCarthy didn’t know what he was going to talk about (he never planned very far ahead), so he brought notes for a couple of speeches: one about housing for veterans, and one, consisting mostly of clippings cobbled together by a speechwriter, about Communists in the government. McCarthy had seemingly had very little to do with that second speech, but he decided to go with it.

It is not known exactly what McCarthy said in Wheeling, and he later claimed that he couldn’t find his copy of the speech. But a local paper reported him as having waved a piece of paper on which, he said, were the names of two hundred and five Communists working in the State Department. The story was picked up by the Associated Press, and soon it was everywhere.

McCarthy had, in fact, no such list. He did not have even a single name. He may have calculated that a dinner speech at a women’s club in West Virginia was a safe place to try out the “I have in my hand” gimmick, and, somewhat to his surprise, it worked. In subsequent appearances on his Lincoln’s-birthday circuit, he gave the same speech, though the numbers changed. In Reno, the list had fifty-seven names. It didn’t matter. He had grabbed the headlines, and that was all he cared about. He would dominate them for the next four and a half years. Wheeling was McCarthy’s Trump Tower escalator. He tossed a match and started a bonfire.

Larry Tye’s purpose in his new biography, “ Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy ” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is to make the case that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century Joe McCarthy. Tye draws on some fresh sources, including McCarthy’s papers, which are deposited at Marquette, his alma mater, and unpublished memoirs by McCarthy’s wife, Jean, and his longtime aide James Juliana, who served as his chief investigator.

Tye also quotes from transcripts of the executive sessions (that is, hearings closed to the public) of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee, which McCarthy essentially hijacked in 1953 and put to the business of exposing Communists in the government.

Tye describes these transcripts—almost nine thousand pages—as “recently unveiled . . . and never before closely examined.” This is a little misleading. The transcripts were released in 2003, and they have been quoted from extensively, notably by Ted Morgan, in “ Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America .”

But they are important. The other senators on McCarthy’s subcommittee stopped attending the hearings, since McCarthy dominated everything, and so it became his personal star chamber. He could subpoena anyone (Tye says he called five hundred and forty-six witnesses in the year and a half he ran the show), and was answerable to no one. These transcripts give us McCarthy unbound. As for Tye’s McCarthy-Trump comparison? He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny.

McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. He cared little which they did, nor did he care that, in his entire career as a Communist-hunter, he never sent a single “subversive” to jail. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.

McCarthy had the support of a media conglomerate, the Hearst papers, which amplified everything he said, and he had cheerleaders in the commentariat, such as the columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell, both of whom reached millions of readers in a time when relatively few households (in 1952, about a third) had a television set. He tried to block a hostile newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal , from his press conferences, and he egged on the crowds at his rallies to harass the reporters.

Right from the start, McCarthy had prominent critics. But almost the entire political establishment was afraid of him. You could fight him, in which case he just made your life harder, or you could ignore him, in which case he rolled right over you. He verbally abused people who disagreed with him. He also had easy access to money, much of it from Texas oilmen, which he used to help unseat politicians who crossed him.

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To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong. Tye quotes the pollster George Gallup, in 1954: “Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him.” His fans liked that he was a bully, and they liked that he scandalized the genteel and the privileged.

McCarthy forced government agencies, by the constant threat of investigations, to second-guess appointments, and to fire people he had smeared just because he had smeared them. He didn’t need to prove anything, and he almost never did, because it didn’t matter. Your name in McCarthy’s mouth was the kiss of death. He was a destroyer of careers.

To call McCarthy a conspiracy theorist is giving him too much credit. He was more like a conspiracy-monger. He had one pitch, which he trotted out on all occasions. It was that American governmental and educational institutions had been infiltrated by a secret network of Communists and Communist sympathizers, and that these people were letting Stalin and Mao have their way in Europe and Asia, and were working to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship.

What distinguished McCarthy’s claims was their outlandishness. He didn’t attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy. In 1951, he claimed that George Marshall, the Secretary of Defense, the former Secretary of State, and the author of the Marshall Plan, had been, throughout his career, “always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin.” Marshall, he said, sat at the center of “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”

Even Republicans were aghast. Marshall was almost universally regarded as a selfless public servant and a model of personal probity. The leader of the Party’s conservative wing, Robert Taft, expressed regret that McCarthy had overstated his case. But that was about as far as most Republicans had the nerve to go. Nothing came of McCarthy’s attack. For McCarthy, though, the important thing was that he had said something that was manifestly preposterous and had got away with it. He must have realized that he could get away with anything.

McCarthy lied all the time. He lied even when he didn’t need to lie, as Tye thinks is the case with the war record. When he didn’t have any facts to embellish, he made them up. He found that, if he just kept on repeating himself, people would figure that he must be onto something.

He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.

At the end, when he was about to be condemned by the Senate for his behavior toward his colleagues, he was invited to sign letters of apology that would probably have got him off the hook. He refused, and is supposed to have thrown the pen across the room. He was like the Don in Mozart’s opera: he preferred eternal damnation to admitting that he had ever been wrong.

Like many bamboozlers who succeed by preying on the earnest and the credulous, McCarthy was easily bamboozled. He often tied witnesses who had little to hide in knots, but the actual spies who testified (and there were one or two) completely fooled him. He hired rashly, and he valued loyalty over ability. He was also loyal to those he believed were loyal to him—and that, ironically, turned out to be his undoing.

I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, but, to a certain extent, McCarthy is a scapegoat. His excesses and his political vulgarity have made him a convenient symbol of Cold War anti-Communism—its ideological intolerance, its disregard for civil liberties, its exaggerated warnings about Communist infiltration and expansion. But McCarthy was responsible for none of those things. The work he is credited with doing—purging the government of spies and “security risks,” typically people suspected of Communist sympathies—had already been done before he got up to speak in Wheeling.

This is the main reason (along with his general disorderliness) that no one McCarthy investigated was ever convicted of anything. There were almost no Communists left to fire or spies left to convict. McCarthy can be blamed for continuing the official practice of witch-hunting long past the point it made any sense, but he cannot be blamed for creating it. The blame for that rests with a man who hated McCarthy, Harry Truman.

After the war ended, in 1945, it was not immediately clear what our future relations with the Soviet Union would be. But, by early 1947, many in the American government had concluded that the Soviet Union was a hostile power, and that Communist parties in Western Europe were threats to democracy there.

On March 12th, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, Truman relieved the situation of any remaining ambiguity. He announced that it was the policy of the United States “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” “Armed minorities” meant Communist insurgents, and “outside pressures” meant the Kremlin. The policy was quickly named the Truman Doctrine. That speech was the start of the Cold War.

Nine days later, Truman signed an executive order establishing the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which tasked the F.B.I. and other agencies with undertaking investigations of government employees suspected of disloyalty—specifically, anyone with “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group, or combination of persons, designated by the Attorney General as totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.” According to the Columbia scholar Ira Katznelson, between 1947 and 1953, 4,765,705 federal employees had to fill out forms initiating loyalty investigations. Of these employees, 26,236 were referred for further scrutiny, and five hundred and sixty were fired or not hired. Homosexuals were targeted as security risks (being vulnerable to blackmail) or as generally undesirable. There were no anti-discrimination laws to protect them. They were simply fired.

At the same time, Congress began its own loyalty investigations. Hearings on Communists in Hollywood, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC ), began in October, 1947, and resulted in the convictions for contempt of Congress of the so-called Hollywood Ten, all of whom served prison terms. The following July, Elizabeth Bentley, a former member of the American Communist Party (C.P.U.S.A.), gave HUAC the names of American spies, among them Harry Dexter White, formerly a senior official in the Treasury Department.

A month later, another ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers, gave testimony that led to the most spectacular unmasking of the anti-Communist crusade, that of the former high-level State Department official Alger Hiss . Hiss was convicted of perjury in January, 1950, and sent to prison. The same month, an atomic spy ring was busted when the physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to being a member. His confession would lead, in 1951, to the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for espionage, and, in 1953, to their execution.

There were spies to be caught. The historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, who have examined documents from K.G.B. files and from the Venona project—in which the U.S. government intercepted coded messages from Soviet intelligence agencies—say that more than five hundred Americans gave intelligence to the Soviets.

Rooting out spies and informants was therefore a perfectly sensible policy, and that part did not take long. The problem was that the process didn’t stop there. It was allowed to sweep up people who had only a notional connection to national security, like high-school teachers and Hollywood screenwriters. It licensed anti-Communist groups of all types—official (government agencies), quasi-official (educational and ecclesiastical authorities), and pseudo-official (editorialists and ad-hoc organizations)—to pursue their own investigations. And it constantly redefined what made a person a security risk or disloyal.

Espionage was a crime. But it was not a crime to be a member of the C.P.U.S.A. Communists had been on the ballot in every Presidential election from 1924 to 1940. Nor was it a crime to be a fellow-traveller or to belong to a front organization. “Front” and “fellow-traveller” were terms of art, anyway; they meant whatever the authorities in charge of an investigation said they did. By 1950, most of the people caught up in the investigations had already ended their relations with the C.P.U.S.A. and with radical politics generally. Many were committed anti-Communists. But their past was used to brand them as disloyal.

McCarthy had nothing to do with any of this. By the time he took charge of his subcommittee, in 1953, the C.P.U.S.A. was moribund, and the Soviets had run out of sympathetic Americans willing to give them intelligence, and had resorted to conventional means of spycraft.

McCarthy was therefore reduced to making national-security mountains out of molehills like Edward Rothschild, a bookbinder in the Government Printing Office who might have pilfered some classified documents but who had no access to atomic secrets. Rothschild seems to have been the only plausible security risk that McCarthy ever uncovered; he lost his job, but he was never prosecuted.

The case of Irving Peress was another McCarthy extravaganza. Peress was a dentist, drafted by the Army in 1952 because the Army needed dentists. He had declined to answer a question about his political affiliations on his loyalty questionnaire, and he may have had some prior connection to the C.P.U.S.A. But he had no access to secret information—he fixed teeth—and by the time McCarthy got to him, at the end of 1953, he was due to be discharged.

McCarthy made up for the smallness of the fry he was nabbing by claiming that these people had been hired and promoted by higher-ups who knew all about their Communist connections. Peress, McCarthy announced, was part of “the deliberate Communist infiltration of our Armed Forces.”

This case of overkill is one of the things that brought McCarthy to his Waterloo, the Army-McCarthy hearings, held in the spring of 1954 and followed, Tye estimates, by eighty million Americans, half the population. The hearings had nothing to do with Communism. Their purpose was to determine whether the chief counsel on McCarthy’s subcommittee, Roy Cohn, had put improper pressure on the Army to give special treatment to another member of McCarthy’s staff, a wealthy nonentity named David Schine, after Schine was drafted. As he always did when attacked, McCarthy punched right back, countercharging that the Army had been holding Private Schine hostage—putting him on K.P. duty, threatening to send him overseas—in order to get McCarthy’s subcommittee to drop its investigations into the Communist infiltration of the armed services.

It was obvious that Cohn had made threats in an effort to get Schine excused from the ordinary duties of life as an Army private. On the behind-the-scenes advice of President Dwight Eisenhower, who loathed McCarthy, the Army had compiled a detailed chronology of Cohn’s many phone calls to and meetings with Army officials, and a list of his demands. There was no way McCarthy was going to win that argument.

And yet McCarthy didn’t do what almost anyone else would have done. He didn’t throw Schine and Cohn under the bus. McCarthy knew that Schine was worthless, but he also knew that Cohn was deeply attached to him, and McCarthy valued Cohn as a man who was as free of scruples as he was. McCarthy put his career at risk for Schine and Cohn, and he lost. It may have been honor among scoundrels, but it was honor, of a sort.

The most interesting thing about the hearings, looking back, is the story behind the celebrated dénouement, an exchange between McCarthy and the Army’s hired counsel Joseph Welch, seen by millions on television, and by many people afterward in Emile de Antonio’s documentary “Point of Order!” It began when McCarthy, incensed by what he regarded as Welch’s overly aggressive examination of Cohn, revealed that a young lawyer named Fred Fisher, at Hale & Dorr, where Welch practiced, had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization accused of being a Communist front.

Welch was a crafty courtroom performer of the “I’m just a simple country lawyer” variety, and he put on his best basset-hound face. “Until this moment, Senator,” he said, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy spoke up again, repeating things he had just said about Fisher. Welch tried to stop him. “Senator, may we not drop this?” he asked. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Again, McCarthy refused to change the subject. Welch let him talk. “Mr. McCarthy,” he said finally, when McCarthy was done, “I will not discuss this further with you. . . . If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good.” The room erupted in applause. Even reporters applauded. It was June 9, 1954, the thirtieth day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. The dragon had been slain.

What had actually happened is that the bamboozler was bamboozled. It was not McCarthy who had outed Fred Fisher. It was Joseph Welch. The whole Fisher story had appeared two months before in a front-page article in the Times . “Mr. Welch today confirmed news reports,” the Times said, “that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher, Jr., of his own Boston law office because of admitted membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell, Jr., the Attorney General, as a Communist-front organization.” The article was accompanied by a photograph of Fisher. Welch’s lament that McCarthy had ruined Fisher’s reputation was bogus. Fred Fisher was a trap, and McCarthy walked right into it. It has been said that when Welch left the hearing room, with tears in his eyes, he winked at a reporter he knew. I doubt he did this, but he was certainly entitled to.

The hearings had lasted a hundred and eighty-seven hours—long enough for McCarthy to make himself sufficiently toxic in the public mind for the Senate to do something about him. A committee was appointed to prepare charges for a vote of censure. In the end, in a classic profile in senatorial courage, the decision was made to “condemn” McCarthy for a single offense, which was not that he had destroyed the careers of dozens of public servants, or that he had used congressional immunity to libel people, but that he had behaved disrespectfully to other senators. The vote was 67–22. Senator John F. Kennedy, whose younger brother Bobby had served on McCarthy’s staff, did not vote. Back trouble, he explained, had prevented him from coming to the floor.

The vote had no practical consequences. Although McCarthy was relieved of his chairmanship when the Democrats gained control of the Senate, he could have gone on. But the other senators had a way of punishing him that was more effective than condemnation, and, conveniently, less visible to voters. They shunned him. When McCarthy rose to speak, they wandered off the floor. When he approached groups in the cloakroom, they disbanded.

McCarthy had never cared what kind of attention he got, as long as he got it, and he could not handle being ignored. He had always assumed—people found this one of the most twisted things about him—that he could continue to pal around with men whose reputations he had trashed. Already a heavy drinker, he descended further into alcoholism, and he died on May 2, 1957, in Bethesda Naval Hospital. Hepatitis was given as the cause of death; Tye thinks, based on the medical records, that this is wrong, and that McCarthy died of alcohol withdrawal—the D.T.s. Either way, he drank himself to death. He was forty-eight.

Many national politicians would probably have been happy to drop loyalty investigations after 1953, but no one wanted to speak out against them. It was not an issue one could afford to be on the wrong side of. So subversive-hunting lasted until 1957, when a series of Supreme Court opinions curtailed the power of government agencies to inquire into the political beliefs of citizens. The reign of inquiry had lasted ten years. Joseph McCarthy was only one episode in that miserable saga.

Tye wisely does not propose to draw many lessons for today from the story of McCarthy’s career. Our demagogue is far more dangerous than a senator who was not very popular even in his own state. Ours is the President, and he has henchmen running the State Department and the Justice Department who are dedicated to clearing a legal path for him to eliminate whoever stands in his way. The Trump Administration has done serious damage to the entire executive branch. It will take a long time to repair it.

But what is puzzling about McCarthy is also puzzling about Trump. Once McCarthy was in a position of power, he was incapable of modifying his behavior. He could not shut it off, even when everyone around him was begging him to. He had a single explanation for everything, and the only way he knew how to do his job was by threatening and prevaricating. Trump, too, is a one-trick pony. He says the same things on every issue and in response to every crisis.

Voters get tired of one-trick ponies. Not every civil servant with progressive views can be a spy, despite McCarthy’s insistence, just as not every story Trump finds unflattering can be fake, and not every investigation he dislikes can be a hoax. Endlessly recycled charges lose their sting. That is what happened to McCarthy. It was not that the public decided that Communists were not a real danger. They just got sick of the constant snarling and browbeating. They wanted it to go away.

When Joseph Welch arrived in Washington for the famous hearings, some of the people involved in the Army’s defense were shocked that he did not seem to have studied the case. They worried that he was unprepared. But Welch knew that he could not beat McCarthy on the facts, because McCarthy would just make up new facts. He saw that the only way to destroy McCarthy was to give him the opportunity to destroy himself. He let McCarthy rant and bully and interrupt for thirty days, and then, as the clock was winding down, he closed in for the kill. It was pure rope-a-dope, and a lesson, possibly, for Joe Biden. ♦

By Eric Lach

By Susan B. Glasser

By David Remnick

Help inform the discussion

McCarthyism and the Red Scare

In the end, President Eisenhower had no choice but to fight back against Senator Joseph McCarthy—and he did

In the early 1950s, American leaders repeatedly told the public that they should be fearful of subversive Communist influence in their lives. Communists could be lurking anywhere, using their positions as school teachers, college professors, labor organizers, artists, or journalists to aid the program of world Communist domination. This paranoia about the internal Communist threat—what we call the Red Scare—reached a fever pitch between 1950 and 1954, when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, a right-wing Republican, launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army. During Eisenhower’s first two years in office, McCarthy’s shrieking denunciations and fear-mongering created a climate of fear and suspicion across the country. No one dared tangle with McCarthy for fear of being labeled disloyal.

Any man who has been named by a either a senator or a committee or a congressman as dangerous to the welfare of this nation, his name should be submitted to the various intelligence units, and they should conduct a complete check upon him. It’s not too much to ask. Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1953

It has long been a subject of debate among historians: Why didn’t Eisenhower do more to confront McCarthy? Journalists, intellectuals, and even many of Eisenhower’s friends and close advisers agonized over what they saw as Ike’s timid approach to McCarthyism. Despite his popularity and his enormous political capital, they believed, Ike refused to engage directly with McCarthy. By avoiding the Red-hunting senator, some have argued, Eisenhower allowed McCarthyism to continue unchecked.

By contrast, later scholars working from the documentary record perceived a design in Eisenhower’s strategy with McCarthy. Ike adopted an “indirect approach.” Instead of going right at McCarthy, Eisenhower worked behind the scenes to undercut and stymie the senator and his attacks. The political scientist Fred Greenstein, for example, argued that Eisenhower’s handling of McCarthy provides evidence of a “hidden hand” approach to government. In this interpretation, Ike rode above the fray of politics while secretly pulling levers and using White House influence to obstruct McCarthy and his allies.

President read my text with great irritation, slammed it back at me and said he would not refer to McCarthy personally—‘I will not get in the gutter with that guy.’ C. D. Jackson, Eisenhower speechwriter, 1953

Looking at all the evidence, the clearest conclusion is that Eisenhower did not want to confront Joe McCarthy at all. And during 1953, he tried to avoid the whole issue, hoping the Senate would silence the explosive senator. McCarthy was a Republican, after all, and many fellow senators supported him. Ike needed to keep his party unified to pass bills in other areas; battling McCarthy would only stir up a civil war inside the GOP.

Furthermore, Eisenhower did not want to appear “soft” on the problem of internal subversion. There had, after all, been real spies who penetrated into the State Department, notably Alger Hiss.

And Communist agents had stolen classified secrets from the wartime Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were condemned to die in the electric chair as punishment for their theft of atomic secrets, Eisenhower did not for a moment consider granting them clemency. On June 19, 1953, they were both put to death.

Eisenhower in 1953 improvised in dealing with McCarthy, at first trying to ignore him, then trying to outdo him in the Red-hunting business. Then he tried to seduce him with promises of new legislation to destroy Communism in America. None of these tactics worked. ‘The Age of Eisenhower ,’ chapter 6

But at the start of 1954, the picture changed. Joe McCarthy turned his investigatory resources on the US Army and on members of the administration itself. Eisenhower had no choice but to fight back. The first move the White House made was to try to discredit the men around McCarthy, notably the lawyer Roy Cohn, who was leading the investigation, and Cohn’s assistant David Schine, who had recently been drafted into the Army.

The Army compiled a damaging dossier of dirt on Cohn, showing that he used threats and intimidation to demand that Schine be given plum assignments and easy duty. The White House leaked this dossier to the press and Congress. McCarthy and Cohn now stood accused of abuse of power.

Ike went one step further. In order to close down McCarthy’s reckless use of subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify before his committee, Eisenhower invoked executive privilege.

In May 1954, Ike simply said that administration officials and all executive branch employees would ignore any call from McCarthy to testify. Eisenhower explained his action, declaring that “it is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the executive branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising with each other on official matters,” without those conversations being subject to Congressional scrutiny.

It was a bold and daring move, and it worked. McCarthy, his credibility in tatters and now starved of witnesses, hit a brick wall—and his fellow senators turned against him. In early December 1954, the Senate passed a motion of condemnation, in a vote of 67 to 22. McCarthy was ruined—and within three years he was dead from alcohol abuse. The era of McCarthyism was over. Ike had helped bring it to a bitter end.

Return to THE AGE OF EISENHOWER landing page

Spies on the radio.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, dramatic radio programs told tales of government agents on a quest to find Communist infiltrators who, in the words of one, "would undermine our America."

David Harding, Counterspy  began in 1942 as the story of an American operative fighting the Nazis, and the long-running program easily adapted to a Cold War narrative in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In this episode from December 1950, Harding reads a message from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover calling on law enforcement officers, patriotic organizations, and individuals to report on anything that might indicate espionage, sabotage, or subversive activities.

I Was a Communist for the FBI , based on a film of the same name, ran for just over a year, from April 1952 until October 1953. In this episode, from April 1953, Matt Cvetic describes his undercover assignment: "For nine years I was living on the brink of a volcano, a volcano called Communism, a volcano which is centered in Soviet Russia but which is erupting all over the world."  

Comics and pulps

Comic books and pulp fiction magazines also brought the threat of Communism to life. The Catholic Catechetical Guild of Minneapolis published these two comics for distribution in 1947 and 1960.

McCarthy begins to question Ike

In this November 24, 1953, address over radio and television, McCarthy turned an attack on former President Truman to questions directed at Eisenhower. “Even for McCarthy," says Will Hitchcock in The Age of Eisenhower , this was a loopy, unhinged performance.”

Death of a senator

The new york times reports on mccarthy's death.

McCarthy died of liver failure on May 2, 1957. The following day the New York Times front page story said, “After the Senate voted in December 1954 to condemn his tactics, his political power waned. He was seldom in his Senate seat and his advice, seldom offered, was little heeded.”

Research   |   UW and the community

October 14, 2014

Documents that Changed the World: Joseph McCarthy’s ‘list,’ 1950

Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, right, holds forth at the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations’ McCarthy-Army hearings on June 9, 1954. At left is Joseph Welch, chief senate counsel representing the United States Army.

Wikimedia commons

Sometimes a document can be devastating — can ruin lives and change history — even if it doesn’t really exist.

Such is the case with the subject of University of Washington Information School Professor Joe Janes’ latest entry in his Documents that Changed the World podcast series: Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his infamous “list” supposedly naming communists who had infiltrated the heart of the United States government.

In the podcasts, Janes explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents, both famous and less known. UW News and Information presents these occasionally, and all of the podcasts are available online at the Information School website .

Documents that Changed the World:

• Joseph McCarthy’s “list,” 1950

It was on Feb. 9, 1950, that McCarthy — who had dubbed himself “Tailgunner Joe” for acts of World War II bravery he did not in fact commit — told a crowd of 275 at the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club that the U.S. State Department was “thoroughly infested with communists” and brandished papers he claimed were a list of 57 such subversives.

No such list quite existed, but as Janes says in the podcast, that didn’t matter “since the seeds were sown, in ground that was made fertile by serious and possibly justified concerns about the growing influence and power of communism on the world stage and possibly at home as well.”

History records what resulted — investigations, witch hunts, blacklists, bullying from the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Army-McCarthy hearings in the Senate and an atmosphere of fear that lasted for years. (Sadly, even the UW itself was not immune.)

“My primary interest here was this as an example of a document that didn’t actually exist, and which yet still had great impact,” Janes said when discussing the podcast. “So far as we can tell, for all McCarthy’s bluster, his ‘list(s)’ were mainly numbers either taken from other sources or misremembered or just made up, and yet people believed them, and acted as a result of what he said he had.

“The times were right, and the Wisconsin senator and others were allowed to go on scapegoating and fear-mongering for several years.”

Though echoes of “McCarthyism” resounded in American culture for years (and are said by some to continue even now), the tide seemed to fully turn against Tailgunner Joe on June 9, 1954, when he was confronted by the gentle-speaking but fed-up Joseph N. Welsh , head counsel for the Army.

“ Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last? ” he demanded of McCarthy, who gazed down at his notes. Welch then added: “If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good.” It was as if a nation’s fever had finally broken.

But of course “we’re all smarter now,” Janes says in the podcast, “more experienced at critical thinking and separating truth from fiction. So it couldn’t happen again. We’ve all learned from our mistakes, and know better than to trust any person, or organization, or government, that claims to have a list of bad people or bad ideas. If only.”

• The Documents that Changed the World podcast series is also available on iTunes , with more than 175,000 downloads there so far.

Previous installments of the “Documents that Changed the World” series

• Series introduction/President Obama’s Birth Certificate
• The Nineteenth Amendment
• John Snow’s cholera map, 1854
• Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’
• The Internet Protocol, 1981
• The AIDS Memorial Quilt
• An 18 1/2-minute presidential mystery
• Gutenberg indulgence, 1454
• ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’
• The fraudulent ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’
• A papal resignation
• The ‘Casablanca’ letters of transit
• ‘What is the Third Estate?’ 1789
• Alfred Binet’s IQ test, 1905
• Einstein’s letter to FDR, 1939
• The Riot Act, 1714
• The Rosetta Stone
• The Zapruder film, Nov. 22, 1963
• The Book of Mormon
• The DSM, 1952.
• Airline ‘black box’ flight data recorder, 1958
• Alaska Purchase Check, 1868
• Zimmerman Telegram, 1917
• Rules of Association Football (Soccer), 1863
• The Star Spangled Banner, 1814

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• Lesson Plans
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Lesson 3: The Rise and Fall of Joseph McCarthy

The excesses of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's anti-communist crusade led to his eventual censure by the U.S. Senate, and his downfall.

Library of Congress

The revelations of Soviet spy networks in the United States, and the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, may have generated big headlines in the late 1940s, but they would pale compared to those that Joseph McCarthy would elicit. A freshman senator from Wisconsin, McCarthy shocked the country in 1950 when he claimed to possess evidence that significant numbers of communists continued to hold positions of influence in the State Department. For the next two years he and other Republicans would use these charges to hammer the Truman administration, and the "communists in government" theme accounts, at least in part, for the landslide victory enjoyed by the GOP in the 1952 election. Republican control of Congress in 1953 and 1954 gave McCarthy access to more power than ever, but increasingly he became a liability both to his party and to Dwight Eisenhower's administration. McCarthy's antics, particularly his targeting of the U.S. Army, would lead to his official condemnation by the Senate in 1954.

In this lesson students will learn about McCarthy's crusade against communism, from his bombshell pronouncements in 1950 to his ultimate censure and disgrace in 1954. Through an examination of documents and political cartoons they will study key points in McCarthy's career, with an eye to understanding how his efforts brought American anticommunism to fever pitch, and then into disrepute.

Guiding Questions

Were Joseph McCarthy's accusations justified?

• Did McCarthy strengthen or weaken anticommunism efforts in postwar America?

Learning Objectives

Analyze the motives behind McCarthy's accusations and the political and cultural significance of the hearing in the U.S.

Examine the competing perspectives on HUAC and the proper role of government with regard to protecting safety and liberty.

Assess the role of media as public informant during and after the McCarthy hearings. 

Evaluate the short and long term effects of the McCarthy hearings on public trust of government and the power of government. 

Lesson Plan Details

First elected as a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin in 1946, few noticed Joseph McCarthy during his first three years in the Senate. All that changed when in February 1950 he made a bombshell speech. Addressing the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, he announced that he had evidence that in spite of the Truman administration's efforts to eliminate disloyal elements from government service, 205 members of the Communist Party continued to work for the State Department.

It is likely that even McCarthy himself was surprised at the public reaction to his revelations. In the past two years the United States had watched as China had become a communist country, the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb, and North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea. America, which had seemed the world's dominant power in 1945, felt its position slipping away, and McCarthy's accusations provided a convenient explanation.

The Senate, therefore, was inclined to look into these charges, and a committee was soon set up under Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings. The charges, Tydings concluded, were without foundation, but few were paying attention. Three days after the Maryland senator publicly rejected McCarthy's accusations Julius Rosenberg was arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union . The issue of Soviet penetration of the U.S. government seemed shockingly real. As for Tydings, when he stood for reelection later that year McCarthy and his allies accused him of being "soft on communism." Marylanders took the charge seriously—Tydings, who had been in the Senate since 1927, was defeated.

The message sent by the Tydings defeat was clear—it was dangerous to stand in the way of Joe McCarthy. For the next two years the accusations flew, and quite a few Democrats (and even some Republicans, such as Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who dared criticize the senator from Wisconsin) found themselves accused of being "communist sympathizers." In 1952, aided in part by McCarthy's accusations (but probably more so by the stalemated war in Korea), the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress, while GOP candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in a landslide.

In the short term at least, Republican dominance in Washington gave McCarthy new prestige and power. He was awarded the chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and used his position to subpoena a series of government employees. His accusations did not remain limited to the State Department. Soon employees of Voice of America, and even officers and enlisted men of the U.S. Army, were called before McCarthy's committee and accused of being at best naïve dupes of communism, and at worst traitors to their country.

In the long run, however, Republican control of Congress and the White House led to McCarthy's downfall. Many Republicans had privately expressed doubts about McCarthy's reckless accusations, but had remained silent when his targets were Democrats. Among these was Eisenhower himself, who had refused even to defend his former Army colleague George C. Marshall when McCarthy suggested that he was a subversive. However, after 1952 the Wisconsin Senator was becoming more and more of an embarrassment to the GOP. When in 1953 he began to suggest that communists had infiltrated the Army, Eisenhower went on the attack, issuing an order forbidding any member of his administration from testifying before McCarthy's committee. (For more on Eisenhower's attitude toward McCarthy, see Michael J. Birkner, " Eisenhower and the Red Menace ", located at the EDSITEment-reviewed site National Archives Educator Resources .)

The final straw came in 1954, when the Army accused McCarthy and his chief lieutenant, Roy Cohn, of pressuring the Army into giving preferential treatment to Cohn's friend G. David Schine. Now it was McCarthy himself who was on the hot seat, and in the resulting Army-McCarthy Hearings, broadcast on nationwide television, the Wisconsin Senator came across as a common bully. Meanwhile, the Army's chief counsel, Joseph N. Welch, finally shamed him with the famous words, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" In December 1954 he was formally censured by the Senate, which put an end to his investigations once and for all. A painful chapter in America's history had at last come to its close.

For those wanting more information on the life of Joseph McCarthy, a timeline is available  as well as an article  "Cold War Policies, 1945-1991" accessible throught the Internet Archive. A brief biographical sketch may be found at Biography. 

NCSS.D2.Civ.3.9-12. Analyze the impact of constitutions, laws, treaties, and international agreements on the maintenance of national and international order.

NCSS.D2.Civ.4.9-12. Explain how the U.S. Constitution establishes a system of government that has powers, responsibilities, and limits that have changed over time and that are still contested.

NCSS.D2.His.3.9-12. Use questions generated about individuals and groups to assess how the significance of their actions changes over time and is shaped by the historical context.

NCSS.D2.His.4.9-12. Analyze complex and interacting factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras.

NCSS.D2.His.5.9-12. Analyze how historical contexts shaped and continue to shape people’s perspectives.

NCSS.D2.His.6.9-12. Analyze the ways in which the perspectives of those writing history shaped the history that they produced.

NCSS.D2.His.14.9-12. Analyze multiple and complex causes and effects of events in the past.

NCSS.D4.1.9-12. Construct arguments using precise and knowledgeable claims, with evidence from multiple sources, while acknowledging counterclaims and evidentiary weaknesses.

Familiarize students with McCarthyism and arguments regarding why these hearings were held using this TED-Ed video "What is McCarthyism? And how did it happen?"

Review the lesson plan. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and links from EDSITEment-reviewed websites used in this lesson. Download and print out selected documents and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing. Alternatively, excerpted versions of these documents are available as part of the downloadable PDF .

Download the Text Document for this lesson, available here as a PDF . This file contains excerpted versions of the documents used in the various activities, as well as questions for students to answer. Print out and make an appropriate number of copies of the handouts you plan to use in class.

Analyzing primary sources —If your students lack experience in dealing with primary sources, you might use one or more preliminary exercises to help them develop these skills. The Learning Page at the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress includes a set of such activities. Another useful resource is the Educator Resources  of the National Archives, which features a set of Document Analysis Worksheets . Finally, History Matters offers helpful pages on " Making Sense of Letters and Diaries "" and " Making Sense of Political Cartoons " which give helpful advice to teachers in getting their students to use such sources effectively.

Activity 1. McCarthy's Accusations

Students will read excerpts from McCarthy's famous Wheeling speech, in which he first claims to have evidence of continued communist infiltration of the State Department. They will also read responses to these charges by Truman, certain Republican Senators, and the political cartoonist Herblock. The following documents are all available at, or accessible via, EDSITEment-reviewed resources; excerpts from the first two are available on pages 2–4 of the Text Document that accompanies this lesson.

• Excerpts from Speech of Joseph McCarthy, Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9, 1950
• Excerpt from President Truman's News Conference at Key West, March 30, 1950
• "National Suicide": Margaret Chase Smith and Six Republican Senators Speak out against Joseph McCarthy's Attack on "Individual Freedom"
• "I Have Here in my Hand... "

To help guide their reading, students should answer the following questions related to these documents (available as a worksheet on pages 1–2 of the Text Document ):

• What information did McCarthy cite to show that America was losing the war against Communism?
• Explain what McCarthy meant when he said "When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within."
• How did McCarthy describe the sorts of people engaged in "traitorous actions" in the United States?
• What did Truman mean when he claimed that McCarthy was an "asset" to the Kremlin?
• According to Truman, how did McCarthy fit in with the overall strategy of the Republican Party?
• Evaluate the five statements by the Republican senators. What was their purpose in issuing these statements?
• In your opinion, how did partisanship fighting between the Republicans and Democrats interfere with the issue at hand?
• How does the political cartoon by Herblock portray McCarthy? Why do you think he chose to portray McCarthy this way?

Activity 2. Eisenhower and McCarthy

The sweeping Republican victory in the 1952 election gave McCarthy more power than ever to conduct his investigations, but it also caused him to become more sweeping in his accusations. His behavior was deeply troubling to President Eisenhower, but while Eisenhower found the senator personally repellent, he knew that McCarthy had many supporters in both the House and the Senate. To personally criticize McCarthy would run the risk of alienating them, and thus endangering his legislative agenda. He also believed that to respond personally to McCarthy's accusations would be beneath the dignity of the presidency. Ultimately he would come out against the Wisconsin Republican, but not until 1954 (this is covered in the next activity).

In this activity students will consider a series of documents (or excerpts thereof) and political cartoons related to Eisenhower's attitude toward McCarthy. The documents all come from the Eisenhower Presidential Library , accessible via the EDSITEment-reviewed Digital Classroom , while the cartoons come from Herblock's History , accessible via the Library of Congress. After reading them the class will be divided into two groups to debate the following proposition: "Eisenhower should have spoken out against McCarthy earlier than he did."

Brief excerpts of the following may be found on pages 5–9 of the Text Document .

• "You Mean I'm Supposed to Stand on That?"
• " Nothing Exceeds Like Excess"
• "Have a Care, Sir"
• Draft page, "Sixth Draft" of Eisenhower speech given on October 3, 1952 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on "Communism and Freedom." The deleted paragraph refers to General George C. Marshall
• Letter, President Eisenhower to his friend, Harry Bullis, May 18, 1953
• Letter, President Eisenhower to his brother, Milton Eisenhower, October 9, 1953
• Notes from the day by C.D. Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to the President, November 27, 1953
• Memorandum, Stanley M. Rumbough, Jr. and Charles Masterson, Special Assistants in the White House , to Murray Snyder, Assistant White House Press Secretary, about responding to Senator McCarthy, December 1, 1953
• Notes from the day by C.D. Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to the President, December 2, 1953

Activity 3. The Fall of Joseph McCarthy

For this activity students will consider a series of documents related to the Army-McCarthy hearings and McCarthy's censure. These documents come from the Eisenhower Presidential Library, History Matters, and "Our Documents," which is accessible via History Matters. (Brief excerpts from these documents may be found on pages 10–18 of the Text Document .)

Divide the class into three groups, each of which will examine a set of readings related to one aspect of McCarthy's decline and fall. To save class time, the readings might be assigned as homework.

Group #1: Eisenhower vs. McCarthy (excerpts on pages 10–12 of the Text Document )

• Diary entry by James C. Hagerty, White House Press Secretary, February 25, 1954
• Diary entry by James Hagerty, March 10, 1954
• Diary entry by James Hagerty, May 14, 1954
• Diary entry by James Hagerty, May 17, 1954
• Diary entry by Press Secretary James Hagerty, May 28, 1954

Group #2: The Army-McCarthy Hearings (excerpts on pages 13–17 )

• Have You No Sense of Decency"
• "Damage": Collier's Assesses the Army-McCarthy Hearings

Group #3: McCarthy's Censure ( pages 18–19 of the Text Document )

• Senate Resolution 301: Censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1954)

After reading their assigned documents, each student should write a paragraph describing the events detailed in them, and explaining how they might have contributed to McCarthy's downfall. Then in class students should meet briefly in their groups to compare their paragraphs and draft together a "master paragraph" that incorporates all of the relevant information and analysis.

When students are finished creating their master paragraph, reshuffle the class into groups of three, each one made up of a member of one of the previous groups. These new groups will compare their paragraphs, and then use them to create an essay explaining McCarthy's downfall in 1954.

After completing this lesson, students should be able to respond to the following questions:

• What was the basis for McCarthy's accusations and investigations?
• To what extent were the criticism against McCarthy and Truman justified?
• Describe and evaluate Eisenhower's policy regarding McCarthy.
• Analyze the reasons behind McCarthy's downfall in 1954.

Suggested Activities:

Mock Senate Hearing: A simulation that recreates the McCarthy hearings with students interpreting primary sources in order to play the role of those who testified, as well as news reporters, citizens who have read newspapers or watched hearings on television, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, actors and writers accused of being communists, and other perspectives to illustrate the debate and the reach of the hearings.  The simulation can be facilitated in small groups with multiple perspectives represented or as a larger group with students taking on a wider range of different roles (Senators, witnesses, reporters, citizens, etc.). 

Position Ad:  Using photographs, excerpts from speeches, quotes from those involved with HUAC and the federal government, and other perspectives, create a short video that presents a position on the CQ: Did McCarthy strengthen or weaken anticommunism efforts in postwar America? Students can use storyboard software and voice over technology to construct this digital media artifact.

McCarthy Graphic Novel: Illustrate a multi-panel story about the McCarthy hearings in the form of a graphic novel or comic. Use quotes from primary sources to fill in the speech bubbles, caption frames using information grounded in research on the era, and present multiple perspectives before establishing your position—through your illustration—in response to the CQ: Did McCarthy strengthen or weaken anticommunism efforts in postwar America?

McCarthy Today: If McCarthy were to time travel to today, what issue(s) might he respond to in a similar fashion? Would you, as U.S. Senator from your state, support or refute his arguments? What evidence would McCarthy use to support his position and what evidence will you use to support your position? Your response can include audio and visual media as you analyze and respond to a contemporary issue from multiple sides.  This can be adapted to address any time between the McCarthy hearings and today. 

The EDSITEment-reviewed site " Educator Resources "" from the National Archives and Records Administration, includes numerous group and individual activities in which students examine telegrams between McCarthy and Truman in February 1950 (that is, just after McCarthy's Wheeling speech).

The second activity in this lesson mentions McCarthy's attack on George C. Marshall. Teachers who wish to spend more time on this subject may want to have their students read an excerpt from that speech, which McCarthy made in June 1951. It stands out as a classic example of how McCarthy was able to twist a policy disagreement into a charge of treason. The excerpt may be found at the Modern History Sourcebook , accessible via the EDSITEment-reviewed Internet Public Library.

An audio file of one of McCarthy's speeches —before the Irish Fellowship Club of Chicago on St. Patrick's Day, 1954—is available at the site Authentic History , which is accessible via the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Teaching American History . All or some of this file (it is just under thirteen minutes in its entirety) might be played for students in order to give them a sense for his manner of speaking. One question that might be asked is whether his words as spoken sound more convincing than they appear in print.

The 1964 film Point of Order is a documentary based on the Army-McCarthy hearings, mainly consisting of actual televised footage from the hearings. Teachers who want to provide their students with more details about this event might show them some or all of this film, which runs 93 minutes in its entirety. More information on Point of Order may be found at the site "Cold War Policies, 1945–1991," accessible via the Internet Archive.

Recommended Websites

• Joseph McCarthy
• Point of Order
• " Communists in Government Service "
• " A Declaration of Conscience "
• " Have You No Sense of Decency? "
• " You Mean I'm Supposed to Stand on That? "
• " Nothing Exceeds Like Excess "
• " Have a Care, Sir "
• " I Have Here in my Hand ... "
• " Not Only Ridiculous, but Dangerous "
• " Enemies from Within "
• " National Suicide "
• McCarthy Telegram, page 1
• McCarthy Telegram, page 2
• McCarthy Telegram, page 3
• McCarthy Telegram, page 4
• McCarthy Telegram, page 5
• McCarthy Telegram, page 6
• Reply from Truman (probably unsent)
• Michael J. Birkner, "Eisenhower and the Red Menace" (2001)
• Notes from the day by C.D. Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to the President, November 30, 1953
• Memorandum, Stanley M. Rumbough, Jr. and Charles Masterson, Special Assistants in the White House , to Murray Snyder, Assistant White House Press Secretary, about responding to Senator McCarthy, December 1, 1953, page 1
• Senator Joseph McCarthy, The History of George Catlett Marshall, 1951
• CNN—The Cold War
• Senator Joseph McCarthy, Address to the Irish Fellowship Club, Chicago, Illinois, March 17, 1954

Materials & Media

The rise and fall of mccarthy: worksheet 1, related on edsitement, lesson 1: soviet espionage in america, lesson 2: the house un-american activities committee, jazz beyond borders: jazz appreciation month 2019.

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What is McCarthyism?

What led to mccarthyism, how did mccarthyism begin, when and how did mccarthyism end, what were the results of mccarthyism.

McCarthyism

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• UShistory.org - McCarthyism
• Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University - McCarthyism
• HistoryNet - Mother Teresa
• Digital History - McCarthy and McCarthyism
• Spartacus Educational - McCarthyism
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• Miller Center - McCarthyism and the Red Scare
• McCarthyism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

McCarthyism is part of the Red Scare period of American history in the late 1940s and 1950s. During that time, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy produced a series of investigations and hearings to expose supposed communist infiltration of various areas of the U.S. government. Other aspects of the Red Scare included the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood blacklist . The term McCarthyism has since become a byname for defamation of character or reputation by indiscriminate allegations on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.

The idea that it was necessary to guard against people seeking to overthrow the U.S. government took root early in the 20th century. Advances made by the Soviet Union following World War II , coupled with the victory in 1949 of the Chinese Communist Party in establishing the People’s Republic of China and the apparent inability of the United States to prevent the spread of communism , were among the factors causing fear of communist infiltration in the United States.

In 1950, Joseph McCarthy, who had been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, made a speech in Wheeling , West Virginia , in which he stated that the U.S. was engaged in a “battle between communistic atheism and Christianity” and declared that he had “here in my hand” a list of a large number of communists working in the State Department—a number that he gave at various times as 205, 81, and 57. The accusations triggered investigations and kept McCarthy and his search for communist subversion within the U.S. government in the spotlight.

Joseph McCarthy’s accusations of communist infiltration into the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the army ’s charge that McCarthy had sought preferential treatment for a recently drafted associate led to 36 days of televised Senate hearings, known as the McCarthy hearings, that began in April 1954. The event showcased McCarthy’s bullying tactics and culminated when, after McCarthy charged that the army’s lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, employed a man who had once belonged to a communist front group, Welch responded, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Also in 1954, journalist Edward R. Morrow produced an exposé of McCarthy on his news program See It Now . The public turned against McCarthy, and the Senate censured him.

Joseph McCarthy’s charges that various government entities were infested with communists or communist sympathizers were mostly undocumented, and he was unable to make plausible charges against any person or institution. Nonetheless, his accusations resulted in some people losing their jobs and others facing popular condemnation. The persecution of innocent persons on the charge of being communist and the forced conformity that the practice engendered in public life came to be called McCarthyism.

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McCarthyism , name given to the period of time in American history that saw U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin produce a series of investigations and hearings during the 1950s in an effort to expose supposed communist infiltration of various areas of the U.S. government. The term has since become a byname for defamation of character or reputation by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations, especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.

McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1946 and rose to prominence in 1950 when he claimed in a speech in Wheeling , West Virginia , that 57 communists had infiltrated the State Department , adding:

One thing to remember in discussing the Communists in our government is that we are not dealing with spies who get thirty pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.

McCarthy’s subsequent search for communists in the Central Intelligence Agency , the State Department, and elsewhere made him an incredibly polarizing figure. After McCarthy’s reelection in 1952, he obtained the chairmanship of the Committee on Government Operations of the Senate and of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. For the next two years he was constantly in the spotlight, investigating various government departments and questioning innumerable witnesses about their suspected communist affiliations. Although he failed to make a plausible case against anyone, his colourful and cleverly presented accusations drove some persons out of their jobs and brought popular condemnation to others.

McCarthyism both reached its peak and began its decline during the “McCarthy hearings”: 36 days of televised investigative hearings led by McCarthy in 1954. After first calling hearings to investigate possible espionage at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey , the junior senator turned his communist-chasing committee’s attention to an altogether different matter, the question of whether the Army had promoted a dentist who had refused to answer questions for the Loyalty Security Screening Board. The hearings reached their climax when McCarthy suggested that the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch , had employed a man who at one time had belonged to a communist front group. Welch’s rebuke to the senator—“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”—discredited McCarthy and helped to turn the tide of public opinion against him. Moreover, McCarthy was also eventually undermined significantly by the incisive and skillful criticism of a journalist, Edward R. Murrow . Murrow’s devastating television editorial about McCarthy, carried out on his show, See It Now , cemented him as the premier journalist of the time. McCarthy was censured for his conduct by the Senate, and in 1957 he died. While McCarthyism proper ended with the senator’s downfall, the term still has currency in modern political discourse.

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Article contents

Mccarthyism and the second red scare.

• Landon R. Y. Storrs Landon R. Y. Storrs Department of History, University of Iowa
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.6
• Published online: 02 July 2015

The second Red Scare refers to the fear of communism that permeated American politics, culture, and society from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the opening phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This episode of political repression lasted longer and was more pervasive than the Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I. Popularly known as “McCarthyism” after Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), who made himself famous in 1950 by claiming that large numbers of Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, the second Red Scare predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single maverick politician. Nonetheless, “McCarthyism” became the label for the tactic of undermining political opponents by making unsubstantiated attacks on their loyalty to the United States.

The initial infrastructure for waging war on domestic communism was built during the first Red Scare, with the creation of an antiradicalism division within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the emergence of a network of private “patriotic” organizations. With capitalism’s crisis during the Great Depression, the Communist Party grew in numbers and influence, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program expanded the federal government’s role in providing economic security. The anticommunist network expanded as well, most notably with the 1938 formation of the Special House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, which in 1945 became the permanent House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Other key congressional investigation committees were the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Members of these committees and their staff cooperated with the FBI to identify and pursue alleged subversives. The federal employee loyalty program, formalized in 1947 by President Harry Truman in response to right-wing allegations that his administration harbored Communist spies, soon was imitated by local and state governments as well as private employers. As the Soviets’ development of nuclear capability, a series of espionage cases, and the Korean War enhanced the credibility of anticommunists, the Red Scare metastasized from the arena of government employment into labor unions, higher education, the professions, the media, and party politics at all levels. The second Red Scare did not involve pogroms or gulags, but the fear of unemployment was a powerful tool for stifling criticism of the status quo, whether in economic policy or social relations. Ostensibly seeking to protect democracy by eliminating communism from American life, anticommunist crusaders ironically undermined democracy by suppressing the expression of dissent. Debates over the second Red Scare remain lively because they resonate with ongoing struggles to reconcile Americans’ desires for security and liberty.

• anticommunism
• Martin Dies
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• federal loyalty program
• J. Edgar Hoover
• House Un-American Activities Committee
• Joseph McCarthy
• political repression

The second Red Scare refers to the anticommunist fervor that permeated American politics, society, and culture from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the opening phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This episode lasted longer and was more pervasive than the first Red Scare, which followed World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 . Popularly known as “McCarthyism” after Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), who made himself famous in 1950 by claiming that large numbers of Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, the second Red Scare in fact predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single politician. “McCarthyism” remains an apt label for the demagogic tactic of undermining political opponents by making unsubstantiated attacks on their loyalty to the United States. But that term is too narrow to capture the complex origins, diverse manifestations, and sprawling cast of characters involved in the multidimensional conflict that was the second Red Scare. Defining the American Communist Party as a serious threat to national security, government and nongovernment actors at national, state, and local levels developed a range of mechanisms for identifying and punishing Communists and their alleged sympathizers. For two people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, espionage charges resulted in execution. Many thousands of Americans faced congressional committee hearings, FBI investigations, loyalty tests, and sedition laws; negative judgements in those arenas brought consequences ranging from imprisonment to deportation, loss of passport, or, most commonly, long-term unemployment.

Interpretations of the second Red Scare have ranged between two poles, one emphasizing the threat posed to national security by the Communist Party and the other emphasizing the threat to democracy posed by political repression. In the 1990s, newly accessible Soviet and U.S. intelligence sources revealed that more than three hundred American Communists—some Manhattan Project technicians and other government employees among them—indeed did pass information to the Soviets, chiefly during World War II. Scholars disagree about whether all these people understood themselves to be engaged in espionage and about how much damage they did to national security, but it is clear that the threat of espionage was real. So too, however, was repression in the name of catching spies. The second Red Scare remains a hotly debated topic because Americans continue to differ on the optimal balance between security and liberty and how to achieve it.

Anticommunism has taken especially virulent forms in the United States because of distinctive features of its political tradition. As citizens of a relatively young and diverse republic, Americans historically have been fearful of “enemies within” and have drawn on their oft-noted predilection for voluntary associations to patrol for subversives. This popular predisposition in turn has been easier for powerful interests to exploit in the American context because of the absence of a parliamentary system (which elsewhere produced a larger number of political parties as well as stronger party discipline) and of a strong civil service bureaucracy. Great Britain, a U.S. ally in the Cold War, did not experience a comparable Red Scare even though it too struggled against espionage. 1

The American Communist Party

Explaining American anticommunism requires an assessment of American communism. The 19th-century writings of Karl Marx gave birth to an international socialist movement that denounced capitalism for exploiting the working class. Some socialists pursued reform through existing political systems while others advocated revolution. Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 encouraged those in the latter camp. The American Communist Party (CPUSA), established in 1919 , belonged to the Moscow-based Comintern, which provided funding and issued directives, ostensibly to encourage Communist revolutions around the world but in practice to support Soviet foreign-policy objectives. The CPUSA remained small and factionalized until the international economic crisis and the rise of European fascism in the 1930s increased its appeal. During the Great Depression, “the heyday of American communism,” party members won admiration from the broader Left for their effective organizing on behalf of industrial and agricultural workers and for their bold denunciation of lynching, poll taxes, and other instruments of white supremacy. In 1935 , party leaders adopted a strategy of cooperating with noncommunists in a “Popular Front against fascism.” Party members joined or organized groups that criticized Adolf Hitler’s policies and supported the Spanish resistance to General Francisco Franco. They also drew connections between fascism abroad and events at home, from the violent suppression of striking miners, textile workers, and farmworkers, to the unfair trial of the “Scottsboro boys” (nine African American teenagers from Alabama accused of raping two white women), to prohibitions on married women’s employment. Not always aware of the participation of Communists, diverse activists worked through hundreds of Popular Front organizations on behalf of labor, racial and religious minorities, and civil liberties. The CPUSA itself grew to about 75,000 members in 1938 ; many times that number participated in Popular Front causes. 2 Because rank-and-file members often kept their party affiliation secret as they attempted to influence Popular Front groups, the term “front organization” came to connote duplicity rather than solidarity.

The Popular Front period ended abruptly in August 1939 , when the Soviet and German leaders signed a nonaggression pact. Overnight the CPUSA abandoned its fight against fascism to argue for “peace” and against U.S. intervention in Europe. Exposing the American party leadership’s subservience to Moscow, this shift alienated many party members as well as the noncommunist leftists and liberals who had been willing to cooperate toward shared objectives. In June 1941 , Hitler broke the pact by invading the Soviet Union, and the Soviets became American allies. Reversing course again, American Communists enthusiastically supported the Allied war effort, and the party’s general secretary, Earl Browder, adopted a reformist rather than revolutionary program. With Hitler’s defeat, however, the fragile Soviet-American alliance dissolved; U.S. use of atomic weapons in Japan and Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe inaugurated the long Cold War between the two powers. In 1945 William Z. Foster replaced Browder at the head of the American party, which now harshly denounced capitalism and President Harry Truman’s foreign policy. Riven by internal disputes and increasingly under attack from anticommunists, the CPUSA became more isolated. Its numbers had dwindled to below 10,000 by 1956 , when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev officially acknowledged what many American Communists had refused to believe: that Stalin had been responsible for the death of millions in forced labor camps and in executions of political rivals. After these revelations, the CPUSA faded into insignificance. 3

As the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, American Communists were neither devils nor saints. The party’s secretiveness, its authoritarian internal structure, and the loyalty of its leaders to the Kremlin were fundamental flaws that help explain why and how it was demonized. On the other hand, most American Communists were idealists attracted by the party’s militance against various forms of social injustice. The party was a dynamic part of the broader Left that in the 1930s and 1940s advanced the causes of labor, minority rights, and feminism. 4

The Formation of an Anticommunist Coalition

Anticommunists were less unified than their adversary; diverse constituencies mobilized against communism at different moments.

During the violent industrial conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, employers and employer associations frequently avoided acknowledging workers’ grievances, by charging that foreign-born radicals were fomenting revolution. Employers often enlisted local law officers and private detectives in their efforts to quell labor militancy, which they cast as unpatriotic.

The correlation between labor unrest and anticommunist zeal was enduring. The first major Red Scare emerged during the postwar strike wave of 1919 and produced the initial infrastructure for waging war on domestic communism. Diverse strikes across the nation coincided with a series of mail bombings by anarchists. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer charged that these events were evidence of a revolutionary conspiracy. Palmer directed the young J. Edgar Hoover, head of the General Intelligence Division of the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI), to arrest radicals and their associates and to deport the foreign born among them. The ensuing raids and surveillance activities violated civil liberties, and in 1924 the bureau was reined in. But Hoover became FBI director, a position he would hold until his death in 1972 . Intensely anticommunist, and prone to associating any challenge to the economic or social status quo with communism, Hoover would be a key player in the second Red Scare. Other early participants in the anticommunist network were Red squads on metropolitan police forces, patriotic societies and veterans’ groups, and employer associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 5

After the wartime federal sedition and espionage laws expired, and after the FBI was curbed, state and local officials took primary responsibility for fighting communism. By 1921 thirty-five states had passed sedition or criminal syndicalism laws (the latter directed chiefly at labor organizations and vaguely defined to prohibit sabotage or other crimes committed in the name of political reform). 6 Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, anticommunists mobilized in local battles with labor militants; for example, in steel, textiles, and agriculture and among longshoremen. The limitations of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in organizing mass-production industries led to the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which organized workers regardless of craft into industry-wide unions such as the United Automobile Workers. Encouraged by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 , the CIO pioneered aggressive tactics such as the sit-down strike and further distinguished itself from the AFL with its organizing efforts among women and racial minorities. These positions attracted Communists to the CIO’s service, leading anti-union forces to charge that the CIO was a tool of Communist revolutionaries (a charge that the AFL echoed). Charges of communism were especially common in response to labor protests by African Americans in the South and by Mexican Americans in the West. 7

Education was another anticommunist concern during the interwar period. Groups such as the American Legion pressured school boards to drop “un-American” books from the curriculum. By 1936 , twenty-one states required loyalty oaths for teachers. School boards and state legislatures investigated allegations of subversion among teachers and college professors. 8 Also in these interwar years, organized Catholics joined the campaign against “godless” communism. Throughout this period, the federal role in fighting communism consisted mainly of using immigration law to keep foreign-born radicals out of the country, but the FBI continued to monitor the activities of Communists and their alleged sympathizers. 9

The political and legal foundations of the second Red Scare thus were under construction well before the Cold War began. In Congress, a conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats had crystallized by 1938 . Congressional conservatives disliked many New Deal policies—from public works to consumer protection to, above all, labor rights—and they frequently charged that the administering agencies were influenced by Communists. In 1938 the House authorized a Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, headed by Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat. Dies was known as a leading opponent of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 , the CIO, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 . The Dies Committee devoted most of its attention to alleged Communists in the labor and consumer movements and in New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA). For his chief investigator, Dies hired J. B. Matthews, a self-proclaimed former fellow traveler of the Communist Party who later would serve on Senator McCarthy’s staff. Matthews forged a career path for ex-leftists whose perceived expertise was valuable to congressional committees, the FBI, and anti–New Deal media magnates such as William Randolph Hearst. In one early salvo against the Roosevelt administration, Dies Committee members called for the impeachment of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins because she refused to deport the Communist labor leader Harry Bridges; Perkins claimed (correctly) that she did not have the legal authority to deport him. 10 The Bridges controversy and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of August 1939 gave impetus to the passage of Alien Registration Act of 1940 , known as the Smith Act for its sponsor Representative Howard Smith, the Virginia Democrat whose own House committee was investigating alleged Communist influence on the National Labor Relations Board. The Smith Act made it illegal to advocate overthrow of the government, effectively criminalizing membership in the Communist Party, and allowed deportation of aliens who ever had belonged to a seditious organization. Congressional conservatives also engineered passage of the 1939 Hatch Act, which prohibited federal employees from engaging in political campaigning and from belonging to any group that advocated “the overthrow of the existing constitutional form of government.” 11 The law’s passage was driven by the first provision, which responded to allegations that Democratic politicians were using WPA jobs for campaign purposes. It was the Hatch Act’s other provision, however, that created a vital mechanism of the second Red Scare.

The Federal Loyalty Program

To enforce the Hatch Act, the U.S. attorney general’s office generated a list of subversive organizations, and employing agencies requested background checks from the FBI, which checked its own files as well as those of the Dies Committee. FBI agents interviewed government employees who admitted having or were alleged to have associations with any listed group. Congressional conservatives continued accusing the Roosevelt administration of harboring Communists, even after Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 put the Soviets in the Allied camp. Martin Dies charged that the wartime Office of Price Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and other regulatory agencies were run by Communists and “crackpot, radical bureaucrats.” The Civil Service Commission (CSC) created a loyalty board, which reviewed employees named by Dies. When most of those employees were retained, the Dies Committee charged that CSC examiners themselves had subversive tendencies. In 1943 the Dies Committee subpoenaed hundreds of CSC case files in an effort to prove that charge. 12

The Roosevelt administration and its supporters dismissed Dies and his ilk as fanatics, but in 1946 accusations that Communists had infiltrated government agencies began to get traction. Public anxiety about postwar inflation and another strike wave was intensified by Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe and by Russian defector Igor Gouzenko’s exposure of a Canadian spy ring. Highlighting the “Communists in government” issue helped the Republican Party make sweeping gains in the 1946 midterm elections, leading President Harry Truman to formalize and expand the makeshift wartime loyalty program.

The second Red Scare derived its momentum from fears that Communist spies in powerful government positions were manipulating U.S. policy to Soviet advantage. The federal employee loyalty program that Truman authorized in an attempt to neutralize right-wing accusations became instead a key force in sustaining and spreading “the great fear.” Truman’s March 1947 Executive Order 9835 directed executive departments to create loyalty boards to evaluate derogatory information about employees or job applicants. Employees for whom “reasonable grounds for belief in disloyalty” could be established were to be dismissed. To assist in implementing the loyalty program, the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) was made public for the first time. Millions of federal employees filled out loyalty forms swearing they did not belong to any subversive organization and explaining any association they might have with a designated group. Agency loyalty boards requested name checks and sometimes full field investigations by the FBI, which promptly hired 7,000 additional agents. Among the many sources that the FBI checked were the ever-expanding files of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which in 1945 had replaced the Dies Committee. 13

During the program’s peak between 1947 and 1956 , more than five million federal workers underwent loyalty screening, resulting in an estimated 2,700 dismissals and 12,000 resignations. Those numbers exclude job applicants who were rejected on loyalty grounds. More importantly, those numbers exclude the tens of thousands of civil servants who eventually were cleared after one or more rounds of investigation, which could include replying to written interrogatories, hearings, appeals, and months of waiting, sometimes without pay, for a decision. The program’s oft-noted flaws included the ambiguous definition of “derogatory” information and the anonymity of informants who provided it, the reliance on an arbitrary and changing list of subversive organizations, and a double-jeopardy problem for employees for whom a move from one government job to another triggered reinvestigation on the same grounds. Those grounds usually consisted of a list of individually minor associations that dated back to the 1930s. Because loyalty standards became more restrictive over time, employees who did not change jobs too faced reinvestigation, even in the absence of new allegations against them. 14

Loyalty standards tightened as the political terrain shifted. During the summer of 1948 , the ex-Communists Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers testified before HUAC that in the 1930s and early 1940s they had managed Washington spy rings that included dozens of government officials, including the former State Department aide Alger Hiss. A Harvard Law School graduate who had been involved in the formation of the United Nations, Hiss vigorously denied the allegations, and Truman officials defended him. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 . Meanwhile, the Soviets developed nuclear capability sooner than expected, Communists took control in China, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted, and North Korea invaded South Korea. This combination of events increased the Truman administration’s vulnerability to partisan attacks. Senator McCarthy claimed to explain those events by alleging that Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department. Congress then in effect broadened the loyalty program by passing Public Law 733, which empowered heads of sensitive agencies to dismiss an employee on security grounds. An employee deemed loyal could nonetheless be labeled a security risk because of personal circumstances (alcoholism, homosexuality, a Communist relative) that were perceived to create vulnerability to coercion. A purge of homosexuals from the State Department and other agencies ensued. Over Truman’s veto, in 1950 Congress also passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required Communist organizations to register with the U.S. attorney general and created the Subversive Activities Control Board. The new Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by Patrick McCarran (D-Nevada), was soon vying with HUAC for headlines about the battle against Communists on the home front. After McCarthy claimed the loyalty program was clearing too-many employees on appeal, Truman’s Executive Order 10241 of April 1951 lowered the standard of evidence required for dismissal. That same month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the loyalty program’s constitutionality, a reminder that all three branches of government built the scaffolding for the Red Scare. The standards changed again in April 1953 with Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, which extended the security risk standard to every civil service job, imposed more-stringent “morals” tests, and eliminated defendants’ right to a hearing. It was not unusual for a career civil servant to be investigated under the Hatch Act during World War II and then again after each executive order. Of the more than 9,300 employees who were cleared after full investigation under the 1947 standard, for example, at least 2,756 saw their cases reopened under the 1951 standard. Employees who had been cleared never knew when their case might be reopened. Even after the loyalty program was curbed in the late 1950s, the FBI continued to keep tabs on former loyalty defendants. Loyalty investigations often did lasting damage to employees’ economic security, mental and physical health, personal relationships, and civic participation. 15

Because most of those dismissed under the loyalty program were low-level employees, the program’s policy impact, at least outside the State Department’s jurisdiction, has sometimes been underestimated. Unlike dismissals, investigations occurred across the ranks, so all civil servants felt the pressure. Case files declassified in the early 21st century indicate that loyalty investigations truncated or redirected the careers of many high-ranking civil servants, who typically kept secret the fact that they had been investigated. Many of them were noncommunist but left-leaning New Dealers who advocated measures designed to expand democracy by regulating the economy and reducing social inequalities. Their fields of expertise included labor and civil rights, consumer protection, welfare, national health insurance, public power, and public housing; their marginalization by charges of disloyalty impeded reform in these areas and narrowed the scope of political discourse more generally. Through the federal loyalty program, conservative anticommunists exploited public fears of espionage to block policy initiatives that impinged on private-sector prerogatives. 16

The Fear Spreads

The loyalty program for federal employees was accompanied by similar programs focused on port security and industrial security. Private employees on government contracts also faced screening, and state and local governments soon imitated the federal programs. Public universities revived mandatory loyalty oaths. In 1953 , Americans employed by international organizations such as the United Nations became subject to Civil Service Commission loyalty screening, over protests that such screening violated the sovereignty of the international organizations. One researcher estimated in 1958 that approximately 20 percent of the U.S. labor force faced some form of loyalty test. 17 Although espionage trials and congressional hearings were the most-sensational manifestations of McCarthyism, loyalty tests for employment directly affected many more people.

Beyond the realms of government, industry, and transport, anticommunists trained their sights on those arenas where they deemed the potential for ideological subversion to be high, including education and the media. The entertainment industry was an especially attractive target for congressional investigating committees seeking to generate sensational headlines. The House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) 1947 investigation of Communist influence in Hollywood was an early example. Building on an earlier investigation by California’s Tenney Committee, HUAC subpoenaed a long list of players in the film industry. Many of them, including the actor Ronald Reagan, cooperated with HUAC by naming people they believed to be Communists. By contrast, a group that became known as the “Hollywood Ten” invoked their First Amendment right to freedom of association and challenged the committee’s right to ask about their political views. Eventually, after the Supreme Court refused to hear their case, the ten directors and screenwriters spent six months in prison. For more than a decade beyond that, they were blacklisted by Hollywood employers. 18 Later, “unfriendly witnesses” declined to answer questions posed by the investigating committee, by citing their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves. This tactic provided legal protection from prison, but “taking the Fifth” was widely interpreted as tantamount to an admission of guilt, and many employers refused to employ anyone who had so pleaded. Another limitation of the Fifth Amendment strategy was that it did not waive witnesses’ obligation to answer questions about others. Congressional committees pressed witnesses to “name names” of people they knew to be Communists as evidence that they were not sympathetic, or were no longer sympathetic, to communism. Whether or not they answered questions about their own politics, witnesses’ moral dilemma over whether to identify others as Communists became one of the most familiar, and to critics most infamous, of McCarthyism’s dramatic episodes. 19

The entertainment industry blacklist did not end with HUAC’s investigation of Hollywood. As countersubversives issued a steady flow of accusations, the cloud of suspicion expanded. In 1950 , the authors of the anticommunist newsletter Counterattack , who included several former FBI agents, released a booklet called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television . It listed 151 writers, composers, producers, and performers and included a long list of allegedly subversive associations for each person. The booklet was riddled with factual errors. Some of those listed were or had been Communists, but others had not. In any case, they and those on similar lists found it nearly impossible to get work in their fields; some could get hired only by working under another name.

The fear of unemployment produced many ripple effects beyond those felt at the individual level. The second Red Scare curtailed Americans’ willingness to join voluntary organizations. Groups were added to the U.S. attorney general’s list over time, and zealous anticommunists frequently charged that one group or another should be added to the list, including such mainstream, reformist organizations as the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Association of University Women. Very few of the roughly 280 organizations on the official list engaged in illegal activity. 20 Still, association with any listed group could become a bar to employment, and also potentially a justification for exclusion from public housing and veterans’ benefits. Rather than take chances, many people stopped belonging to organizations. Being known as a “joiner” of causes acquired the connotation of being an easy mark for Communists, and defense attorneys encouraged their clients to present themselves as allergic to such activity. 21 Civic groups lost membership, and many Americans hesitated to sign petitions or engage in any activism that might possibly be construed as controversial.

The second Red Scare also reshaped the American labor movement. By the end of World War II, a dozen Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions had Communist party members among their officers. Top CIO leaders tolerated Communists at first, valuing their dedication and hoping to avoid internal division and external attack. In 1947 , however, congressional conservatives overrode President Harry Truman’s veto and passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, required all union officers to swear that they were not Communists or else to face loss of support from the National Labor Relations Board. Many trade union members, especially Catholics, were intensely anticommunist and stepped up their effort to oust Communists from their leadership. In 1948 the Communist Party made the position of its members in the labor movement more difficult by supporting the Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace rather than President Truman. Liberal anticommunists in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Americans for Democratic Action joined conservatives in attacking the CIO’s leftist-led unions, which the CIO finally expelled in 1949 and 1950 . The expulsions embittered many workers and labor allies, and they did not prevent right-wing groups from associating trade unionism with communism. 22

McCarthy’s Fall and the Waning of the Second Red Scare

Many factors combined to weaken McCarthyism’s power in the latter half of the 1950s. With a Republican in the White House as a result of the 1952 election, the partisan motivation for attacking the administration as soft on communism diminished. Opportunists such as Senator McCarthy made increasingly outrageous charges to remain in the spotlight, straining the patience of President Dwight Eisenhower and other Republican leaders such as Robert Taft of Ohio. In 1953 McCarthy became chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, and he used its Subcommittee on Investigations to hold hearings on alleged Communist influence in the State Department’s Voice of America and overseas library programs. The book burnings that resulted from the latter investigation, and the forced resignation of the committee’s research director, J. B. Matthews, after he claimed that the Protestant clergy at large had Communist sympathies, increased public criticism of McCarthy. Newspaper and television journalists began featuring the cases of government employees unfairly dismissed as loyalty or security risks, and various foundations and congressional committees undertook studies that gave further impetus to demands for reforming the loyalty program. McCarthy responded to his critics—from Edward Murrow of the See It Now television program to his fellow legislators—by accusing them of Communist sympathies. His conduct and that of his subordinate Roy Cohn in pressing unsubstantiated charges of disloyalty in the U.S. Army led to televised hearings beginning in April 1954 , which gave viewers an extended opportunity to see McCarthy in action. McCarthy’s popularity declined markedly as a result. In December the Senate censured McCarthy. A few months later, the FBI informant Harvey Matusow recanted, claiming that McCarthy and others had encouraged him to give false information and that he knew other ex-Communist witnesses, such as Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz, to have done the same.

Changes in the composition of the Supreme Court also dampened the fervor of the anticommunist crusade. Four justices were replaced between 1953 and 1957 , and under Chief Justice Earl Warren the court issued several rulings that limited the mechanisms designed to identify and punish Communists. In 1955 and 1956 , the court held that the federal loyalty program could apply only to employees in sensitive positions. In 1959 , the court struck down the program’s reliance on anonymous informants, giving defendants the right to confront their accusers. 23 Meanwhile, on a single day in 1957 , the court limited the powers of congressional investigating committees, restricted the enforcement of the Smith Act on First Amendment grounds and overturned the convictions of fourteen members of the Communist Party of California, and reinstated John Stewart Service to the State Department, which had dismissed him on loyalty grounds in 1951 . Members of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) accused the Supreme Court of weakening the nation’s defenses against communism, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover angrily labeled June 17, 1957 , “Red Monday.” Civil libertarians, by contrast, welcomed the rulings but regretted that they were based narrowly on procedural questions rather than on broad principles. 24

With McCarthy’s disgrace and the Supreme Court’s restrictions on its machinery, the second Red Scare lost much of its power. One government personnel director opined in 1962 that 90 percent of the people who had been dismissed on loyalty grounds in the early 1950s would have had no difficulty under the same circumstances a decade later. Even so, the damage lasted a long time. The applicant pool for civil service jobs contracted sharply and did not soon recover. Former loyalty defendants, even those who had been cleared, lived the rest of their lives in fear that the old accusations would resurface. Sometimes they did; during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, many talented people were passed over for appointments, not because hiring officials doubted their loyalty, but because appointing them risked politically expensive controversy. 25

The loyalty programs and blacklists wound down, but anticommunism remained a potent force through the 1960s and beyond. After court rulings limited the usefulness of state and national sedition laws against members of the Communist Party, FBI director Hoover launched the secret COINTEL program to monitor and disrupt Communists and others he deemed subversive. Targets soon included participants in the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, and feminist movements. 26 Well into the 1960s, local Red Scares waxed and waned in tandem with challenges to the local status quo, above all in southern contexts where white supremacists battled civil rights activists. Segregationists such as Alabama governor George Wallace and Mississippi senator James Eastland—who not incidentally chaired SISS from 1955 to 1977 —routinely linked race reform to communism and charged that “outside agitators” bent on subverting southern traditions were behind demands for integration and black voting rights. 27

Discussion of the Literature

Scholarship on the second Red Scare has emerged in waves, responding to the availability of new sources, changing historical methodologies, and shifting political contexts. 28

Initial debates centered on assessing the causes of, or motivations behind, the anticommunist furor. Richard Hofstadter’s influential interpretation explained McCarthy’s popularity in psychological terms as a manifestation of the “status anxiety” of those who resented the changes associated with a more modern, pluralistic, secular society. Treating McCarthyism as an episode of mass irrationality, Hofstadter argued that its “real function” was “not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies . . . but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.” 29 Subsequent scholarship demonstrated that Hofstadter’s view neglected the role of elites, from congressional conservatives to liberal anticommunists to the FBI, in orchestrating the second Red Scare. Some accounts emphasized the partisan pressures from Republicans and southern Democrats on the Truman administration. 30 Others placed a larger share of the responsibility on Cold War liberalism itself. Some of these scholars wrote from a critical stance influenced by the Vietnam-era disillusionment of the New Left, while others applauded liberal anticommunism and focused on how McCarthy had discredited it. 31 After the post-Watergate strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act made FBI records accessible, attention shifted to the repressive tactics of J. Edgar Hoover, who put citizens under illegal surveillance, leaked information to congressional conservatives, and stood by informants known to be unreliable. 32

In depicting a top-down Red Scare orchestrated by elites, historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s were out of step with their discipline’s shift toward social history. That disjuncture was soon mitigated by an outpouring of studies of Communist activity at the grassroots, in diverse local contexts usually far removed from foreign affairs. 33

The tenor of debate shifted again when the end of the Cold War made available new evidence from Soviet archives and U.S. intelligence sources such as the VENONA decrypts. That evidence indicated that scholars had underestimated the success of Soviet espionage in the United States as well as the extent of Soviet control over the American Communist Party. Alger Hiss, contrary to what most liberals had believed, and contrary to what he maintained until his death in 1996 , was almost certainly guilty of espionage. A few hundred other Americans were secret Communist Party members and shared information with Soviet agents, chiefly during World War II. 34 Some historians interpreted the new evidence to put anticommunism in a more sympathetic light and to criticize scholarship on the positive achievements of American Communists. 35 Others concluded that the reality of espionage did not lessen the damage done in the name of anticommunism. The stakes of the debate rose after the September 11, 2001 , attacks on the United States produced the Patriot Act, which rekindled ideological disagreement over the proper balance between national security and civil liberties; commentators who feared that the “war on terrorism” would be used to quell domestic dissent cited McCarthyism as the relevant historical precedent. The new evidence did not resolve scholarly differences, but it produced a more complicated, frequently less romantic view of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). The paradoxical lesson from several decades of scholarship is that the same organization that inspired democratic idealists in the pursuit of social justice also was secretive, authoritarian, and morally compromised by ties to the Stalin regime. 36

The opening of government records also afforded a clearer view of the machinery of the second Red Scare, and that view has reinforced earlier judgements about its unjust and damaging aspects. In addition to new books on Hoover and the FBI, scholars have produced freshly documented studies of the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), and leading anticommunists and their informants. 37

Scholarship since the late 20th century has tried to transcend the old debates by turning to new approaches. Comparative studies have been useful in exploring the interaction between popular and elite forces in generating and sustaining anticommunism. Michael J. Heale’s analysis of Red Scares in three states identifies a common denominator in the role of political fundamentalists who feared the trend toward a “pluralistic order and a secular, bureaucratizing state.” But local power struggles shaped the timing and target of anticommunist furor. Detroit’s Red Scare erupted as the city’s manufacturing leaders tried to defend their class prerogatives from unions; in Boston, conflict between Catholics and Protestants fueled red-baiting, while Atlanta’s Red Scare became most virulent later, as civil rights activists threatened white supremacy. These and other local- and state-level studies demonstrate that the intensity of Red Scare politics was not a simple function of the strength of the Communist threat. Rather, Red Scares caught fire where rapid change threatened old regimes. Varying mixtures of elite and grassroots forces mobilized to defend local hierarchies, whether of class, religion, race, or gender. 38 International comparisons are bearing fruit too, not least by bringing into sharper relief distinctive aspects of state structure and political development that encouraged or restrained Red Scares. 39

Attention to gender as a category of historical analysis has added another dimension to our understanding of the second Red Scare. The “containment” strategy for halting the spread of communism abroad had a domestic counterpart that prescribed rigid gender roles within the nuclear family. Domestic anticommunism was fueled by widespread anxiety about the perceived threats to American masculinity posed by totalitarianism, corporate hierarchy, and homosexuality. Congressional conservatives used charges of homosexuality—chiefly male homosexuality—in government agencies to serve their own political purposes. High-ranking women in government too were especially frequent targets of loyalty charges, as conservative anticommunists tapped popular hostility to powerful women to rally support for hunting subversives and blocking liberal policies. 40

A related trend in the literature situates McCarthyism within a longer anticommunist tradition. In addition to looking at 19th-century antecedents, early-21st-century work explores the political and institutional continuities between the first and second Red Scares and also notes how conservatives’ deployment of anticommunism to fracture the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition along race and gender lines prefigured the New Right ascendancy under President Ronald Reagan. 41 This longer-term view also has invited further attention to variations within anticommunism, yielding a more nuanced portrait of its diverse conservative, liberal, labor, and socialist camps. 42

Even as they continue to debate the second Red Scare’s origins and sustaining mechanisms, scholars are paying more attention to its effects. Aided by newly accessible materials such as FBI files and the unpublished records of congressional investigating committees, historians are documenting in concrete detail how the fear of communism, and the fear of punishment for association with communism, affected specific individuals, organizations, professions, social movements, public policies, and government agencies. 43 The drive to eliminate communism from all facets and arenas of American life engaged diverse players for many years, and scholars continue to catalogue its direct and indirect consequences.

Primary Sources

In a useful 1988 survey of archival sources on McCarthyism, Ellen Schrecker suggests looking for evidence created by various categories of players: inquisitors, targets, legitimizers, defenders of targets, and observers. 44 It is with regard to the first two categories, especially, that new sources have become accessible. FBI files on individuals and organizations are revealing both about the targets and the inquisitors; some frequently requested files are available online, and others can be obtained, with patience, through a Freedom of Information Act Request . Washington, DC–area branches of the National Archives hold records of surviving case files from the federal employee loyalty program (Record Group 478.2), the Subversive Activities Control Board (Record Group 220.6), the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its predecessor (Record Group 233.25.1, 233.25.2), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (Record Group 46.15), and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Record Group 46.13). The rich papers of anticommunist investigator J. B. Matthews are at Duke University. The Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower Presidential Libraries hold relevant collections on each administration’s handling of “the communist problem.” The Library of Congress holds the papers of Supreme Court justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas and of Truman’s attorney general James McGranery, while the papers of the many U.S. and state legislators who were prominent among the accusers and the accused can be found in various archives in their home states. Records of the American Legion can be found at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University holds the papers of the prime target of the second Red Scare—the Communist Party USA—as well as many related collections. The Fund for the Republic studied McCarthyism and subsequently became a target; its papers are at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University. Also at Princeton are the papers of Paul Tillett Jr., a political scientist who in the 1960s collected but never published a wide range of data on McCarthyism, and American Civil Liberties Union papers. Because so many groups and individuals participated in the second Red Scare in one role or another, manuscript and oral-history collections in archives all over the country hold relevant material. Good examples include the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, which holds the records of the Americans for Democratic Action, Highlander Folk School, and United Packinghouse Workers Union, among many other pertinent collections; the National Lawyers’ Guild papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; the papers of the Civil Rights Congress at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; and labor movement records at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, and the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archives, University of Maryland.

Among the many published memoirs of participants, see Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by Slander ( 1950 ); Whittaker Chambers, Witness ( 1952 ); Alger Hiss, In the Court of Public Opinion ( 1957 ); Peggy Dennis, Autobiography of an American Communist ( 1977 ); and John J. Abt, Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer ( 1993 ).

Links to Digital and Visual Materials

The Hollywood Ten ( 1950 documentary)

Point of Order ( 1964 documentary with footage of 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings)

Dies Committee hearings, 1938-1944 (University of Pennsylvania online gateway to Internet Archive and Hathi Trust)

Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations ( McCarthy Hearings 1953–1954 )

Online Documents about McCarthyism at the Truman Presidential Library

Online documents about McCarthyism at the Eisenhower Presidential Library

“M’Carthy Charges Reds Hold U. S. Jobs ,” Wheeling Intelligencer (WV), Feb. 10, 1950

Excerpts from February 1950 Senate Proceedings on Senator Joe McCarthy’s Speech Relating to Communists in the State Department

Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (American Business Consultants, 1950 )

Edward R. Murrow, See It Now: A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (CBS-TV, March 9, 1954 )

Further Reading

• Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective . New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Goldstein, Robert Justin . American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
• Griffith, Robert . The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate . 2d ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
• Haynes, John Earl , and Harvey Klehr . Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Heale, Michael J. McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 . Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
• Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
• Olmsted, Kathryn S. Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
• Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy . New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Schrecker, Ellen . Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America . Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.
• Storrs, Landon R. Y. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
• Theoharis, Athan G. , and John Stuart Cox . The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Inquisition . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.

1. Joan Mahoney , “Civil Liberties in Britain during the Cold War: The Role of the Central Government,” American Journal of Legal History 33, no. 1 (1989), 53–100 ; Markku Ruotsila , British and American Anti-communism before the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001) ; and Michael J. Heale , “Beyond the ‘Age of McCarthy’: Anticommunism and the Historians,” in Melvyn Stokes , ed., The State of U.S. History (New York: Berg, 2002), 131–153 .

2. On Communist Party membership, see Soviet and American Communist Parties , in Revelations from the Russian Archives , Library of Congress. For an introduction to the vast literature on the Communist Party, see Harvey Klehr , The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984) ; Robin D. G. Kelley , Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) ; Michael Denning , The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997) ; and Kate Weigand , Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) .

3. Curt Gentry , J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 442 ; and Robert Conquest , The Great Terror: A Reassessment , 40th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) .

4. Ellen Schrecker , Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1994), 3 ; see also Michael Kazin , “The Agony and Romance of the American Left,” American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (1995), 1488–1512 . Since the opening of Soviet archives at the end of the Cold War, an outpouring of scholarship has elaborated on both sides of the paradox—on one hand, the American party’s complicity in espionage and with the Stalin regime, and on the other hand, its vital role in democratic social movements. For skepticism of this dualistic assessment of American communism, see John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr , In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 134–139 .

5. Chad Pearson, “Fighting the ‘Red Danger’: Employers and Anti-communism,” Athan Theoharis, “The FBI and the Politics of Anti-communism, 1920–1945,” and Michael J. Heale , “Citizens versus Outsiders: Anti-communism at State and Local Levels, 1921–1946,” all in Robert Goldstein , ed., Little “Red Scares”: Anti-communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921–1946 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014) . See also Kim E. Nielsen , Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001) .

6. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Minneapolis sedition law in 1920. Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders,” 46–47.

7. Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders,” 53.

8. Ellen Schrecker , Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 67 .

9. Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders”; Theoharis, “The FBI and the Politics of Anti-communism.”

10. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes , 44; Landon R. Y. Storrs , The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 53–85, 88 .

11. Eleanor Bontecou , The Federal Loyalty-Security Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953) ; and Rebecca Hill, “The History of the Smith Act and the Hatch Act: Anti-communism and the Rise of the Conservative Coalition in Congress,” in Goldstein , ed., Little “Red Scares,” 315–346.

12. Dies was not alone; in 1944, Governor John Bricker of Ohio, who was the Republican nominee for vice president, claimed that Communists ran the whole New Deal. Storrs, Second Red Scare , 79–81, 251 (quotation), 287.

13. Bontecou, Federal Loyalty-Security Program ; Storrs, Second Red Scare .

14. Storrs, Second Red Scare (program statistics, 292).

15. Storrs, Second Red Scare , 111, 286–292. On the dismissal of homosexuals, see David Johnson , The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

16. Storrs, Second Red Scare . For different interpretation of the relationship between anticommunism and liberalism, see Jennifer Delton , “Rethinking Post–World War II Anticommunism,” Journal of the Historical Society 10, no. 1 (2010), 1–41 .

17. Ralph S. Brown Jr. , Loyalty and Security: Employment Tests in the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958) .

18. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund , The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980) ; Victor S. Navasky , Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980) ; Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle , Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997) ; and Gerald Horne , The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) .

19. Navasky, Naming Names ; Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism , 54–61; and Alice Kessler-Harris , A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012) .

20. Robert Justin Goldstein , American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008) .

21. Storrs, Second Red Scare , 186–189.

22. Nelson Lichtenstein , State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) ; and Steven Rosswurm , ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992) .

23. Peters v. Hobby , 349 U.S. 331 (1955) ; Cole v. Young , 351 U.S. 536 (1956) ; Green v. McElroy 360 U.S. 474 (1959) ; and Vitarelli v. Seaton , 359 U.S. 535 (1959) . In the early 1950s, by contrast, the U.S. Supreme Court had helped legitimize the Red Scare. Dennis v. United States , 341 U.S. 494 (1951) , for example, upheld the Smith Act; Bailey v. Richardson 341 U.S. 918 (1951) affirmed a lower court’s ruling upholding the federal loyalty program.

24. Watkins v. United States , 354 U.S. 178 (1957) ; Yates v. United States , 354 U.S. 298 (1957) . See Michal R. Belknap , The Supreme Court under Earl Warren, 1953–1969 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005) ; Arthur J. Sabin , In Calmer Times: The Supreme Court and Red Monday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) ; and Robert M. Lichtman , The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression: One Hundred Decisions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012) .

25. Storrs, Second Red Scare , 203–204.

26. Early-21st-century scholarship on COINTELPRO includes David Cunningham , There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) , and Seth Rosenfeld , Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Picador, 2013) .

27. Jeff Woods , Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004) ; and George Lewis , The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945–1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004) .

28. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Ellen Schrecker, “Interpreting McCarthyism: A Bibliographical Essay,” in Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism , and Heale, “Beyond the ‘Age of McCarthy.’” Also see John Earl Haynes , Communism and Anti-communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings (New York: Garland, 1987) .

29. Richard Hofstadter , Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), 41–42 . See also his essay, “The Pseudo-conservative Revolt,” in Daniel Bell , ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion, 1955) .

30. Earl Latham , The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) ; and Alan D. Harper , The Politics of Loyalty: The White House and the Communist Issue, 1946–1952 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1969) .

31. See Athan Theoharis , Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971) . By contrast, see Richard Gid Powers , Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press, 1995) .

32. Kenneth O’Reilly , Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983) ; and Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox , The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988) .

33. Examples include Mark Naison , Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983) ; Maurice Isserman , If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987) ; Robbie Lieberman , My Song is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) ; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe ; Randi Storch , Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928–35 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007) ; and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore , Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008) .

34. Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev , The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999) ; and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr , Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999) . These findings stimulated a long list of case studies of various spies and alleged spies, including Harry Dexter White, William Remington, Philip and Mary Jane Keeney, and of course Alger Hiss.

35. John Earl Haynes , Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996) ; and Haynes and Klehr, In Denial . Haynes and Klehr acknowledged McCarthyism’s abuses, but bestselling popular interpreters of the new findings did not; see, for example, Ann Coulter , Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Three Rivers, 2004) ; and M. Stanton Evans , Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (New York: Three Rivers, 2009) .

36. For a discussion of these debates, see Ellen Schrecker , “Soviet Espionage in America: An Oft-Told Tale,” Reviews in American History 38, no. 2 (2010), 355–361 .

37. For example, John Sbardellati , J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012) ; Athan Theoharis , Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002) ; Goldstein, American Blacklist ; Christopher John Gerard , “‘A Program of Cooperation’: The FBI, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the Communist Issue, 1950–1956” (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 1993) ; Michael J. Ybarra , Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2004) ; Kathryn S. Olmsted , Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) ; and Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen , Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) .

38. Michael J. Heale , McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998) . See also Don E. Carleton , Red Scare! Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1985) ; Philip Jenkins , The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) ; Don Parson , Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) ; and Colleen Doody , Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013) .

39. Mahoney, “Civil Liberties in Britain during the Cold War”; Ruotsila, British and American Anti-communism before the Cold War ; and Luc van Dongen , Stéphanie Roulin , and Giles Scott-Smith , eds., Transnational Anti-communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) .

40. Elaine Tyler May , Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988) ; Robert D. Dean , Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) ; Kyle A. Cuordileone , Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005) ; Johnson, Lavender Scare ; and Storrs, Second Red Scare .

41. Michael J. Heale , American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) ; Robert Justin Goldstein , Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1978) ; Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares” ; Alex Goodall , Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013) ; Storrs, Second Red Scare ; and Doody, Detroit’s Cold War .

42. See Jennifer Luff , Commonsense Anti-communism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) ; Ruotsila, British and American Anti-communism ; and Judy Kutulas , The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) .

43. A sampling of this early-21st-century work includes, in addition to works cited above, Phillip Deery , Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014) , on the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; Clarence Taylor , Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) ; Alan M. Wald , American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) ; Edward Alwood , Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007) ; David H. Price , Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) ; Amy Swerdlow , “The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War,” in Linda K. Kerber , Alice Kessler-Harris , and Kathryn Kish Sklar , eds., U.S. History As Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 296–312 ; Shelton Stromquist , ed., Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) ; Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang , eds., Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story” (New York: Palgrave, 2009) ; Aaron D. Purcell , White Collar Radicals: TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009) ; and Susan L. Brinson , The Red Scare, Politics, and the Federal Communications Commission, 1941–1960 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004) .

44. Ellen W. Schrecker , “Archival Sources for the Study of McCarthyism,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988), 197–208 .

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Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare: A First-amendment Case Study from History

by Sandy Flores-Ruiz, age 17

Joseph McCarthy, Edward R. Murrow, and the Red Scare is a first-amendment case study from history. All Wisconsin students should learn the lessons behind this case.

Joe McCarthy was one of the most controversial politicians in American history. He served as a Wisconsin Senator from when he was first elected in 1947, until his death in 1957. He is known for declaring that communist spies and sympathizers had penetrated the U.S. federal government. During the early 1950s, few people dared to speak out against McCarthy as his accusations and tactics were so intimidating. For those who did criticize McCarthy, the consequences were often dire. He would dramatically denounce them and accuse the person of being a communist, often without proof. Jobs were lost and reputations were ruined.

One of the first people to openly challenge McCarthy was renowned journalist, Edward R. Murrow. It took great courage, but Murrow’s exposés about McCarthyism played an important role in the senator’s downfall. On March 9, 1954, millions of Americans watched as Murrow used his national news program to attack McCarthy and his methods. This dramatic chapter in American history was captured in a 2005 film directed by George Clooney: Good Night, and Good Luck.

McCarthyism serves as a lesson and a crucial reminder for students today. One reason to study civics is to learn the value of freedom of the press and freedom of speech as laid out in the First Amendment. During the 1950s, Americans hesitated to exercise their rights or question the actions of so-called anti-communists like McCarthy. He gained the support of many by tapping into American concerns about communist infiltration. Lessons from the McCarthy era highlight that the silence of many can lead to abuses of power. The First Amendment protects us all by giving us the right to speak up.

As the film Good Night, and Good Luck says, the early 1950s was when “a nation was terrorized by its own government.” But McCarthy today is remembered for his role in fomenting divisions in the United States at a time when the Cold War was just ramping up. McCarthy’s investigations exposed communists and caused fear that divided a country. But eventually, when public opinion finally turned against him, Joseph McCarthy and his use of unproven allegations were rejected.

It was the First Amendment that made it possible for Murrow to challenge McCarthy. In the end, it was freedom of speech and freedom of the press, enshrined in our Constitution, that helped protect Americans from McCarthy’s demagoguery.

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• McCarthyism / The "Red Scare"
• Online Documents

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was a little-known junior senator from Wisconsin until February 1950 when he claimed to possess a list of 205 card-carrying Communists employed in the U.S. Department of State. From that moment Senator McCarthy became a tireless crusader against Communism in the early 1950s, a period that has been commonly referred to as the "Red Scare." As chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee, Senator McCarthy conducted hearings on communist subversion in America and investigated alleged communist infiltration of the Armed Forces. His subsequent exile from politics coincided with a conversion of his name into a modern English noun "McCarthyism," or adjective, "McCarthy tactics," when describing similar witch hunts in recent American history. [The American Heritage Dictionary gives the definition of McCarthyism as: 1. The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence; and 2. The use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition.] Senator McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate on December 2, 1954 and died May 2, 1957.

Draft page, "Sixth Draft" of Eisenhower speech given on October 3, 1952 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on "Communism and Freedom" [Stephen Benedict Papers, Box 4, 10-3-52 Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1); NAID #16614761] (The deleted paragraph refers to accusations made by McCarthy against General George C. Marshall and was removed from the speech to avoid causing bad feelings in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin.)

Letter, Senator Joseph McCarthy to President Eisenhower re James B. Conant as High Commissioner in Germany, February 3, 1953 [DDE's Papers as President, Name Series, Box 22, McCarthy Joseph; NAID #16660398]

Letter, President Eisenhower to friend, Harry Bullis, May 18, 1953 [DDE's Records as President, Official File, Box 317, OF 99-R McCarthy, Hon. Joeseph R.; NAID #16702985]

Letter, President Eisenhower to friend, Swede Hazlett, July 21, 1953 (pages 3 and 4 only) [DDE's Papers as President, Name Series, Box 18, Hazlett Swede 1953 (1); NAID #16610971]

Letter, President Eisenhower to his brother, Milton Eisenhower, October 9, 1953 (page 3 only) [DDE's Papers as President, Name Series, Box 12, Eisenhower Milton 1952-1953 (3); NAID #16660401]

Daily Notes by C.D. Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to President Eisenhower, November 27, 1953 [C.D. Jackson Papers, Box 68, Log 1953 (5); NAID #16702995]

Daily Notes by C.D. Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to the President, November 30, 1953 [C.D. Jackson Papers, Box 68, Log 1953 (5); NAID #16702996]

Memorandum, Stanley M. Rumbough Jr. and Charles Masterson, Special Assistants in the White House, to Murray Snyder, Assistant White House Press Secretary, about responding to Senator McCarthy, December 1, 1953 [DDE's Records as President, Official File, Box 317, OF99-R McCarthy, Hon. Joseph R.; NAID #16702981]

Daily Notes by C.D. Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to the President, December 2, 1953 [C.D. Jackson Papers, Box 68, Log 1953 (5); NAID #16702997]

Diary entries by James C. Hagerty, White House Press Secretary [James C. Hagerty Papers, Box 1, January 1-April 6, 1954]

Diary entry, February 25, 1954 ; NAID #16703016 Diary entry, March 8, 1954 ; NAID #16703018 Diary entry, March 10, 1954 ; NAID #16703019 Diary entry, March 24, 1954 ; NAID #16703020

Diary entries by James C. Hagerty, White House Press Secretary [James C. Hagerty Papers, Box 1, May 1954]

Diary entry, May 12, 1954 ; NAID #16703022 Diary entry, May 13, 1954 ; NAID #16703024 Diary entry, May 14, 1954 ; NAID #16703025 Diary entry, May 17, 1954 ; NAID #16703026 Diary entry, May 28, 1954 ; NAID #16703027 Diary entry, May 30, 1954 ; NAID #16703029 Diary entry, May 31, 1954 ; NAID #16703030

Letter, President Eisenhower to Secretary of Defense regarding testimony of Defense Department employees, May 17, 1954 [DDE's Papers as President, Administration Series, Box 25, McCarthy Letters; NAID #16702983]

Notes by L. Arthur Minnich, Assistant White House Staff Secretary [White House Office of the Staff Secretary, L. Arthur Minnich Series, Box 1, Miscellaneous Mc]

Staff Notes on Senator Joseph McCarthy, May 22, 1953 ; NAID #16703043 Staff Notes on Senator Joseph McCarthy, July 15, 1953 ; NAID #16703044 Staff Notes on Senator Joseph McCarthy, July 29, 1953 ; NAID #16703045 Staff Notes on the McCarthy Hearings and the Privacy of Personal Advice, May 17, 1954 ; NAID #16703046 Staff Notes on Senator Joseph McCarthy, November 19, 1954 ; NAID #16703047 Staff Notes on McCarthyism, June 21, 1955 ; NAID #16703048

Letter, Asst. Secretary of Defense Fred Seaton to Senator McCarthy regarding accusations of Communists working in defense facilities, June 3, 1954 [Fred Seaton Papers, FAS Eyes Only Series, Box 4, McCarthy (1); NAID #16703231]

Diary entry by James Hagerty, White House Press Secretary [James C. Hagerty Papers, Box 1, June 1954]

Diary entry, June 8, 1954 ; NAID #16703041

Memo by Ann Whitman regarding events leading up to so-called "break" made by McCarthy, December 7, 1954 [DDE's Papers as President, Administration Series, Box 25, McCarthy Letters; NAID #16702984]

Senate Resolution (S. Res. 116) introduced by Senator Joseph McCarthy, June 20, 1955 [White House Office of the Staff Secretary, L. Arthur Minnich Series, Box 1, Miscellaneous Mc; NAID #16703049]

Secondary Sources:

The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1963.

Who Killed Joe McCarthy? by William B. Ewald, Jr., Simon and Schuster, New York, 1984.

Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective by Richard M. Fried, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990.

The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate by Robert Griffith, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1970.

Joseph McCarthy: The Politics of Chaos by Mark Landis, Susquehanna University Press, Selinsgrove, 1987.

McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin by Michael O'Brien, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 1980.

A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy by David Oshinsky, Free Press, New York; Collier Macmillan, London, 1983.

Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America by Ellen Schrecker, Little, Brown, Boston, 1998.

Additional Information:

McCarthyism Subject Guide

Photographs:

Joseph R. McCarthy ( 1908 - 1957 )

Joseph R. McCarthy was born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, November 14, 1908, on his Irish Catholic parents' dairy farm. A restless student, he dropped out of high school at sixteen to start his own poultry farm on land he had rented from a friend. After a brutal winter killed all his flock, he returned to school in 1929, focused and determined to graduate with his class, which required completing four years of course work in half that time. In 1930, he enrolled in Marquette University and developed a reputation as a card shark and heavyweight boxer. After earning a law degree in 1935 (financed by gambling winnings and wages from odd jobs), he returned home to open his practice and begin a career in politics.

When McCarthy lost his first campaign as the Democratic nominee for district attorney, he decided to seek a nonpartisan position. He soon sought a circuit judgeship and challenged a twenty-year incumbent who dismissed McCarthy as a long shot, an unelectable rookie. McCarthy campaigned with a vengeance and over the course of the election deliberately inflated his opponent's age and salary. His tactics worked and, in 1937, the twenty-nine year old McCarthy became the youngest judge in Wisconsin history.

Five years later, even though his service on the bench excluded him for military service, McCarthy joined the Marines, hoping that his combat experience would enhance his political stature. As an intelligence officer stationed in the Pacific, he spent the war debriefing pilots after they returned from bombing raids over Japan. Yet, when he returned to campaign at home, he transformed himself into "tail-gunner Joe," the battle-scarred veteran who survived hazardous missions over Japanese-held territory and, in the process, "fired more bullets than any marine in history" during his fourteen (a figure he later changed to seventeen and then thirty-two) engagements with the enemy. To prove his courage, he asked to receive (and was awarded) the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Capitalizing on his war record, McCarthy narrowly defeated the overconfident Senator Robert La Follette in the 1946 Republican senatorial primary and assailed his Democratic opponent, Howard McMurray, as a man so desperate for election that he would accept communist support. The baseless charge worked. McCarthy trounced McMurray and, in 1947, became the junior U.S. senator from Wisconsin. He quickly alienated his colleagues (especially after he tried to court the German-American vote by criticizing the prosecution of Nazis accused of slaughtering American troops during the Battle of the Bulge) and he soon feared that he could not be re-elected without a major issue to improve his political standing. Consequently, on February 7, 1950, he told a group of Republican women assembled in Wheeling, West Virginia, that there was serious "communist influence" in the Truman administration, declaring, " I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . names that were known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department." Even though no such list existed, McCarthy's accusations gripped the media and he soon became a national figure, promoted on the covers of national news magazines.

Alleged communist infiltration of government agencies became McCarthy's political calling card. By the 1952 election, he had called Sinologist Owen Lattimore America's "top Russian spy," labeled Secretary of State George C. Marshall "a traitor," nicknamed Secretary of State Dean Acheson the "Red Dean of Fashion," attacked President Truman as a drunkard and "a son of a bitch [who] should be impeached," and repeatedly referred to Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson as "Alger . . . I mean Adlai." His tactics worked and, when reelected, McCarthy gained the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, a position he used, according to biographer David Oshinksy, "to undermine government morale, damage numerous reputations, and make America look sinister in the eyes of the world." In 1953, McCarthy announced that he would investigate alleged communist infiltration of the U.S. Army and savaged the Army for "coddling Communists."

Disturbed by McCarthy's staccato accusations and worried that he had unjustly damaged the reputation of innocent civilians (as well as the image of the Senate), his senatorial colleagues coalesced to investigate both McCarthy and his allegations. Agreeing with Eisenhower that televised hearings would expose the real McCarthy in a way that print coverage could not, Republican leaders decided to let the cameras inside the chambers to televise the thirty-six day hearings. Forty million viewers watched the Army-McCarthy hearings and the national mood began to turn against the senator when, on June 9, 1954, the audience in the Senate Caucus room applauded army counsel Louis Welch's outburst ("Have you no sense of decency, sir?") after the senator tried to attack Welch's young assistant. Six months later, the Senate voted 67-22 to censure McCarthy.

McCarthy ended his career, lonely and out of the political limelight. He died at the Bethesda Naval Hospital May 2, 1957, from complications due to alcoholism and hepatitis.

See also McCarthyism .

Sources: American National Biography Online . Internet on-line. Available From http://www.anb.org; David Oshinksy, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: The Free Press, 1983), passim.

For more information, visit The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers home page at https://erpapers.columbian.gwu.edu/ .

Copyright © 2006. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers. All rights reserved.

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Feb. 9, 1950: Sen. Joseph McCarthy Announces “Enemies Within”

Wheeling newspaper. Source: Ohio County Public Library.

On Feb 9, 1950, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy delivered a speech at the McLure Hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia during which he claimed to hold a list of known communists (“enemies from within”) in the U.S. State Department.

The speech grabbed national headlines and launched the paranoia and persecution now known as McCarthyism.

Howard Zinn described this event in Chapter 16 of A People’s History of the United States:

World events right after the war [WWII] made it easier to build up public support for the anti-Communist crusade at home. . . It was a general wave of anti-imperialist insurrection in the world, which would require gigantic American effort to defeat: national unity for militarization of the budget, for the suppression of domestic opposition to such a foreign policy. Truman and the liberals in Congress proceeded to try to create a new national unity for the postwar years — with the executive order on loyalty oaths, Justice Department prosecutions, and anti-Communist legislation.

In this atmosphere, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin could go even further than Truman. Speaking to a Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, in early 1950, he held up some papers and shouted: “I have here in my 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.”

The next day, speaking in Salt Lake City, McCarthy claimed he had a list of fifty-seven (the number kept changing) such Communists in the State Department. Shortly afterward, he appeared on the floor of the Senate with photostatic copies of about a hundred dossiers from State Department loyalty files. The dossiers were three years old, and most of the people were no longer with the State Department, but McCarthy read from them anyway, inventing, adding, and changing as he read. In one case, he changed the dossier’s description of “liberal” to “communistically inclined,” in another form “active fellow traveler” to “active Communist,” and so on.

McCarthy kept on like this for the next few years. As chairman of the Permanent Investigations Sub-Committee of a Senate Committee on Government Operations, he investigated the State Department’s information program, its Voice of America, and its overseas libraries, which included books by people McCarthy considered Communists. The State Department reacted in panic, issuing a stream of directives to its library centers across the world. Forty books were removed, including The Selected Works of Thomas Jefferson , edited by Philip Foner, and The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman. Some books were burned.

McCarthy became bolder. In the spring of 1954 he began hearings to investigate supposed subversives in the military. When he began attacking generals for not being hard enough on suspected Communists, he antagonized Republicans as well as Democrats, and in December 1954, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to censure him for “conduct . . . unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate.” The censure resolution avoided criticizing McCarthy’s anti-Communist lies and exaggerations; it concentrated on minor matters — on his refusal to appear before a Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, and his abuse of an army general at his hearings.

The full chapter of A People’s History of the United States  is worth reading, as it goes on to talk about the House Un-American Activities Committee and more.

Roy Cohn, who served as a chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare in the 1950s and would later become a leading mob attorney. Cohn represented Trump for years and once claimed he considered Trump to be his best friend. Cohn is the subject of a 2019 documentary titled “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” We highly recommend this Democracy Now! interview with the film’s director, Matt Tyrnauer.

Reflection Questions

Here are some suggested questions for reflection on the topic of McCarthyism:

What was the intended/actual impact of the McCarthy attacks on the labor movement and the Civil Rights Movement?

What was the role of the media and why?

Is the McCarthy era really an era or do we still live with McCarthyism today?

Below are resources for teaching about McCarthyism and the Red Scare, including a textbook critique and classroom lesson.

Related Resources

Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. In this mixer lesson, students meet 27 different targets of government harassment and repression to analyze why disparate individuals might have become targets of the same campaign, determining what kind of threat they posed in the view of the U.S. government.

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Want to Start a Revolution? Black Women Radicals Confront the Red Scare

Historian Dayo Gore shared stories about Black women radicals who were active in revolutionary struggle during the Red Scare. This session was part of the Zinn Education Project’s Teach the Black Freedom Struggle online people’s history series.

Disguising Imperialism: How Textbooks Get the Cold War Wrong and Dupe Students

Article. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. If We Knew Our History series. Too often, when it comes to U.S. Cold War interventions, the official curriculum is sanitized and disjointed, leaving students ill-equipped to make sense out of their nation’s global bullying.

More than McCarthyism: The Attack on Activism Students Don’t Learn About from Their Textbooks

Article. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 2021. If We Knew Our History series.

The history of McCarthyism we teach students should restore the powerful and inspiring stories of the activists and organizations who were its victims.

Catch a Tiger by the Toe

Book – Fiction. By Ellen Levine. 2005. 176 pages. A historical novel for middle school on McCarthyism.

Scandalize My Name: Stories From the Blacklist

Film. Directed by Alexandra Isles. 2000. 60 minutes. Documentary about the impact of the McCarthy era on African Americans in the film industry.

Nov. 28, 1919: Jane Addams and Palmer Raids

The Palmer Raids began in November of 1919 and targeted suspected radical leftists, especially anarchists, and deported them from the United States.

Nov. 24, 1947: Hollywood 10 Held in Contempt of Congress

The “Hollywood 10” directors, producers, and writers who refused to testify at HUAC were held in contempt of Congress.

Nov. 13, 1953: Call to Ban Robin Hood in Indiana Schools

Mrs. White of the Indiana Textbook Commission called for a ban of Robin Hood in all school books for promoting communism.

March 1, 1954: The Green Feather Movement Launched

Five students from Indiana University at Bloomington (IU) started the Green Feather Movement to protest censorship.

March 14, 1954: Salt of the Earth Premieres

The film Salt of the Earth premiered at the 86th Street Grande Theatre, the only theater in New York City that would show the film.

June 9, 1954: Joseph Welch Confronts Sen. Joseph McCarthy

Joseph N. Welch confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy about allegations of communists in the U.S. Army.

June 25, 1954: Elementary School Teacher Fired in Red Scare

At the height of the anti-Communist Red Scare, Massachusetts second-grade teacher Anne P. Hale Jr. was removed from her position because of her prior membership in the Communist Party.

May 14, 1960: Firehoses Confront Free Speech in S.F. City Hall

Peaceful protesters formed a picket line at the House on Un-American Activities Committee hearings.

Jan. 2, 1962: NBC Bans Weavers for Refusal to Sign Loyalty Oath

The Weavers had their scheduled appearance on the NBC Jack Paar Show cancelled when they refused to sign an oath of political loyalty.

Sept. 27, 1962: Silent Spring Published

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was published.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-conservative-backed-group-is-gathering-information-on-civil-servants-ahead-of-a-possible-2nd-trump-term

A conservative-backed group is gathering information on civil servants ahead of a possible 2nd Trump term

WASHINGTON (AP) — From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House.

Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers.

READ MORE: Here’s why each contender on Trump’s VP shortlist may or may not get picked

In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online.

With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.

“We need to understand who these people are and what they do,” said Jones, a former Capitol Hill aide to Republican senators.

The concept of compiling and publicizing a list of government employees shows the lengths Trump’s allies are willing to go to ensure nothing or no one will block his plans in a potential second term. Jones’ Project Sovereignty 2025 comes as Heritage’s Project 2025 lays the groundwork, with policies, proposals and personnel ready for a possible new White House.

The effort, focused on top career government officials who aren’t appointees within the political structure, has stunned democracy experts and shocked the civil service community in what they compare with the red scare of McCarthyism.

Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees, said the language being used — the Heritage Foundation’s announcement praised the group for ferreting out “anti-American bad actors” — is “shocking.”

Civil servants are often ex-military personnel and are required to take an oath to the Constitution to work for the federal government, not a loyalty test to a president, she and others said.

“It just seems as though their goal is to try to menace federal employees and sow fear,” said Simon, whose union backs President Joe Biden, a Democrat, for reelection.

As Trump, who has been convicted of felony charges in a hush money case and is under a four-count federal indictment accusing him of working to overturn his 2020 election loss, faces a likely rematch with Biden this fall, far-right conservatives have vowed to take a wrecking ball to what they call the deep-state bureaucracy.

The Trump campaign has said outside groups don’t speak for the ex-president, who alone sets his policy priorities.

Conservatives view the federal workforce as overstepping its role to become a power center that can drive or thwart a president’s agenda. Particularly during the Trump administration, government officials came under attack from the White House and Republicans on Capitol Hill, as his own Cabinet often raised objections to some of his more singular or even unlawful proposals.

While Jones’ group won’t necessarily be recommending whether to fire or reassign the federal workers it lists, the work aligns with Heritage’s far-reaching Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative administration.

READ MORE: Speaking at evangelical Christian conference, Trump endorses Ten Commandments in schools

Heritage’s Project 2025 proposes reviving the Trump Schedule F policy that would try to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, which could enable mass dismissals — although a Biden administration rule seeks to make that more difficult. The Heritage project is working to recruit and train a new generation to travel to Washington to fill government jobs.

In announcing the $100,000 Innovation Award last month, Heritage said it’d support American Accountability Foundation’s “investigative researchers, in-depth reports, and educational efforts to alert Congress, a conservative administration, and the American people to the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state and ensure appropriate action is taken.”

Heritage President Kevin Roberts said the “weaponization of the federal government” has been possible only because of the “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.” He said he was proud to support the work of American Accountability Foundation workers “in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors.”

The federal government employs about 2.2 million people, including those in the Washington, D.C., area and workers who the unions say many Americans know as friends or neighbors in communities across the country.

About 4,000 positions in the government are considered political appointees who routinely change from one presidential administration to the next, but most are career professionals — from landscapers at Veterans Administration cemeteries to economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who conducted grueling hearings into suspected communist sympathizers during the Cold War. The hearings were orchestrated by a top staffer, Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump.

Skye Perryman, CEO of the advocacy group Democracy Forward, said it’s deeply disturbing and reminiscent of “the darker parts of American history.”

Publicly naming government workers is an “intimidation tactic to try to chill the work of these civil servants,” she said, and part of a broader “retribution agenda” underway this election.

“They’re seeking to undermine our democracy,” she said. “They’re seeking to undermine the way that our government works for people.”

READ MORE: Here’s how Americans feel about Biden and Trump as election season revs up

Jones, from his desk overlooking rickhouses storing barrels in the Bourbon Capitol of Bardstown, scoffed at comparisons to McCarthyism as “nonsense.”

He’s a former staffer to then-Sen. Jim DeMint, the South Carolina conservative Republican who later led Heritage and now helms the Conservative Policy Institute, where American Accountability Foundation has a mailing address. Jones also worked for Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, and provided opposition research for Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential bid.

With six researchers, Jones’ team operates remotely across the country, poring over the information about federal workers within Homeland Security, the State Department and other agencies that deal with immigration and border issues.

Their focus is on the highest ranks of the civil servants — GS-13, GS-14 and GS-15 employees and those in senior executive positions who could put up roadblocks to Trump’s plans for tighter borders and more deportations.

“I think it’s important to the next administration to understand who those people are,” Jones said.

He dismissed the risks that could be involved in publicly posting the names, salary information and other details of federal workers who have some level of privacy or the idea his group’s work could put employees’ livelihoods in jeopardy.

“You don’t get to make policy and then say, ‘Hey, don’t scrutinize me,”‘ he said.

He acknowledges some of the work is often a “gut check” or “instinct” about which federal employees would be suspected of trying to block a conservative agenda.

“We’re looking at, ‘Are there wrong people on the bus right now that are, you know, openly hostile to efforts to secure the southern border?'” he said.

His own group came under scrutiny as it first probed Biden nominees.

Biden had repealed Trump’s Schedule F executive order in January 2021, but a Government Accountability Office report in 2022 found that agencies believed it could be reinstated by a future administration.

Since then, the Biden administration issued a rule that would make it harder to fire workers. A new administration could direct the Office of Personnel Management to undo the regulation, but the process would take time and be open to legal challenges.

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Conservative-backed group is creating a list of federal workers it suspects could resist Trump plans

From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House.

What You Need To Know

An outside group is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the conservative policies promised by donald trump with a $100,000 grant from the influential heritage foundation, the american accountability foundation is digging into the backgrounds of high-ranking government employees, starting with the department of homeland security democracy experts and a government federal employees union say the move conjures up the mccarthy-era red scare heritage's project 2025 has a plan to make it easier to fire federal workers; the biden administration has instituted a rule to try to prevent that.

Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They're relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they're preparing to publish the findings online.

With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.

"We need to understand who these people are and what they do," said Jones, a former Capitol Hill aide to Republican senators.

The concept of compiling and publicizing a list of government employees shows the lengths Trump's allies are willing to go to ensure nothing or no one will block his plans in a potential second term. Jones' Project Sovereignty 2025 comes as Heritage's Project 2025 lays the groundwork, with policies, proposals and personnel ready for a possible new White House.

The effort, focused on top career government officials who aren't appointees within the political structure, has stunned democracy experts and shocked the civil service community in what they compare with the red scare of McCarthyism.

Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees, said the language being used — the Heritage Foundation's announcement praised the group for ferreting out "anti-American bad actors" — is "shocking."

Civil servants are often ex-military personnel and are required to take an oath to the Constitution to work for the federal government, not a loyalty test to a president, she and others said.

"It just seems as though their goal is to try to menace federal employees and sow fear," said Simon, whose union backs President Joe Biden, a Democrat, for reelection.

As Trump, who has been convicted of felony charges in a hush money case and is under a four-count federal indictment accusing him of working to overturn his 2020 election loss, faces a likely rematch with Biden this fall, far-right conservatives have vowed to take a wrecking ball to what they call the deep-state bureaucracy.

The Trump campaign has said outside groups don't speak for the ex-president, who alone sets his policy priorities.

Conservatives view the federal workforce as overstepping its role to become a power center that can drive or thwart a president's agenda. Particularly during the Trump administration, government officials came under attack from the White House and Republicans on Capitol Hill, as his own Cabinet often raised objections to some of his more singular or even unlawful proposals.

While Jones' group won't necessarily be recommending whether to fire or reassign the federal workers it lists, the work aligns with Heritage's far-reaching Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative administration.

Heritage's Project 2025 proposes reviving the Trump Schedule F policy that would try to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, which could enable mass dismissals — although a Biden administration rule seeks to make that more difficult. The Heritage project is working to recruit and train a new generation to travel to Washington to fill government jobs.

In announcing the $100,000 Innovation Award last month, Heritage said it'd support American Accountability Foundation's "investigative researchers, in-depth reports, and educational efforts to alert Congress, a conservative administration, and the American people to the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state and ensure appropriate action is taken."

Heritage President Kevin Roberts said the "weaponization of the federal government" has been possible only because of the "deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats." He said he was proud to support the work of American Accountability Foundation workers "in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors."

The federal government employs about 2.2 million people, including those in the Washington, D.C., area and workers who the unions say many Americans know as friends or neighbors in communities across the country.

About 4,000 positions in the government are considered political appointees who routinely change from one presidential administration to the next, but most are career professionals — from landscapers at Veterans Administration cemeteries to economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who conducted grueling hearings into suspected communist sympathizers during the Cold War. The hearings were orchestrated by a top staffer, Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump.

Skye Perryman, CEO of the advocacy group Democracy Forward, said it's deeply disturbing and reminiscent of "the darker parts of American history."

Publicly naming government workers is an "intimidation tactic to try to chill the work of these civil servants," she said, and part of a broader "retribution agenda" underway this election.

"They're seeking to undermine our democracy," she said. "They're seeking to undermine the way that our government works for people."

Jones, from his desk overlooking rickhouses storing barrels in the Bourbon Capitol of Bardstown, scoffed at comparisons to McCarthyism as "nonsense."

He's a former staffer to then-Sen. Jim DeMint, the South Carolina conservative Republican who later led Heritage and now helms the Conservative Policy Institute, where American Accountability Foundation has a mailing address. Jones also worked for Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, and provided opposition research for Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential bid.

With six researchers, Jones' team operates remotely across the country, poring over the information about federal workers within Homeland Security, the State Department and other agencies that deal with immigration and border issues.

Their focus is on the highest ranks of the civil servants — GS-13, GS-14 and GS-15 employees and those in senior executive positions who could put up roadblocks to Trump's plans for tighter borders and more deportations.

"I think it's important to the next administration to understand who those people are," Jones said.

He dismissed the risks that could be involved in publicly posting the names, salary information and other details of federal workers who have some level of privacy or the idea his group's work could put employees' livelihoods in jeopardy.

"You don't get to make policy and then say, 'Hey, don't scrutinize me,"' he said.

He acknowledges some of the work is often a "gut check" or "instinct" about which federal employees would be suspected of trying to block a conservative agenda.

"We're looking at, 'Are there wrong people on the bus right now that are, you know, openly hostile to efforts to secure the southern border?'" he said.

His own group came under scrutiny as it first probed Biden nominees.

Biden had repealed Trump's Schedule F executive order in January 2021, but a Government Accountability Office report in 2022 found that agencies believed it could be reinstated by a future administration.

Since then, the Biden administration issued a rule that would make it harder to fire workers. A new administration could direct the Office of Personnel Management to undo the regulation, but the process would take time and be open to legal challenges.

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He’s an Emergency Medical Worker Fighting to Save People From His Own Life

Joseph Earl Thomas’s new novel, “God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer,” follows a health care worker on a tumultuous shift where every other patient seems to be someone from his past.

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By Danez Smith

Danez Smith is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently “Homie.” Their next book, “Bluff,” is out in August.

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GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER , by Joseph Earl Thomas

Early one morning my husband asked me if I was enjoying “God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer,” the book I’d spent the last few days reading around the house, sometimes with a look of delight, sometimes laughing or on the verge of tears, sometimes with a look of extreme frustration. “Ask me later today,” I told him, unable to process if “enjoyment” was what I was feeling as I made my way through Joseph Earl Thomas’s debut novel.

The book — which comes after Thomas’s 2023 memoir, “Sink” — invites readers into the life, mind and labor of Joseph, a father, writer, gamer, former Army medic and current graduate student in North Philadelphia who is working as an emergency department tech at a local hospital. The narrative follows Joseph (the author or a character with a seed of the author inside? I think Thomas would like us to question their boundaries) over the course of a long work shift. As the day goes on, it seems Joseph has some personal connection to every other patient he meets, including a man who used to beat him up in middle school and friends of his parents.

That’s the framework of the story, but the real setting of “Otis Spunkmeyer” is Joseph’s mind. He is constantly and rigorously thinking — about what occurs throughout his day; about the general state of his life; about his concerns over money, child support, love, connection, poverty and racism; about his past; about a book he is trying to write; and more. And so, we flash from Joseph’s present back to his time in the military with his best friend, Ray, to scenes of his life with his four children, to his previous relationships and previous work shifts, and to recollections conjured by the steady stream of kin that keep coming through the hospital doors. Here, memory is just as urgent a landscape as the trauma and boredom of the emergency room.

So was I enjoying it? Not at first. I could sense that Thomas was writing with a fierce pen and I knew that I was poring over prose unlike anything I’d previously encountered, prose that felt at times unruly but always athletic in its meta pursuit of clarity. During a conversation between Joseph and his siblings, he thinks: “Was I lying already? Do I keep or leave the gerunds? Is this how I actually talk? Why does this feel better than success? My family makes me hyperconscious.” I knew I was experiencing moments of honesty that left me embarrassed by their vision and resonance. And I knew, about a third of the way into the story, that I was slowly falling for Joseph’s stream of consciousness. But I wasn’t yet convinced.

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Read the Joseph Smith revelations that few Latter-day Saints know about

Touching on god’s name, a future war and polygamy, they were never counted as “scripture,” historians note, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value..

(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) “Christ Appears in Kirtland Temple,” a painting by Walter Rane, depicts Jesus visiting Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in 1836. A new book documents Smith's uncanonized revelations.

A prophecy of war, God’s first name, fierce chastisements and the blessings of polygamy — these are the contents of the more than 40 uncanonized revelations of Joseph Smith that two historians scraped from the thousands of pages left behind by the 19th-century church leader.

As a revelator, Smith was highly prolific. So much so, that his earlier followers didn’t deem it necessary to include every divine dictation in the Doctrine and Covenants , a volume that contains many of his teachings and is read to this day as scripture by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But just because dozens of his statements weren’t given the stamp of “scripture” doesn’t mean they should be forgotten. So argue Stephen Smoot , an adjunct instructor of ancient scripture at church-owned Brigham Young University, and Brian Passantino , a research consultant for the Church History Department.

The co-authors of the new book, “Joseph Smith’s Uncanonized Revelations,” scoured the pages of The Joseph Smith Papers — a comprehensive collection of all the documents created by or under the direction of the faith leader — and settled on 42 recorded statements by Smith and attributed to God.

To be clear, Smoot and Passantino write, their findings do not include anything “that fundamentally overturns any teachings of the church or revolutionizes our understanding of who Joseph Smith was. …Nor are there any revelations in this compilation that suggest Joseph Smith had some deep, undisclosed secrets.”

Anyone looking for the exact date of Jesus’ Second Coming or the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant will have to look elsewhere.

Rather, the scholars write, “these texts are…important in helping Latter-day Saints appreciate Joseph Smith as a modern revelator and prophet.”

Adam’s native tongue and coming war

As far as their subject matter, the revelations run the gamut from administrative to esoteric.

In one, Smith reports engaging in the following 1832 Q&A with God about the Almighty’s name, among other things, in the “pure language” of Adam.

Q. What is the name of God in pure language?

Q. What is the meaning of the pure word Awmen?

A. It is the being which made all things in all its parts.

Q. What is the name of the Son of God?

A. The Son Awmen.

Q. What is the Son Awmen?

A. It is the greatest of all the parts of Awmen, which is the Godhead — the Firstborn.

Q. What is man?

A. This signifies Sons Awmen, the human family, the children of men, the greatest parts of Awmen Sons, the Son Awmen.

Q. What are angels called in pure language?

A. Awmen Angls-men.

Q. What is the meaning of these words?

A. Awmen’s ministering servants — sanctified — who are sent forth from heaven to minister for or to Sons Awmen, the greatest part of Awmen Son.

Another revelation, reminiscent of D&C Section 87′s 1832 prophecy of a deadly Civil War between the North and South, warns that “peace shall soon be taken from the Earth.”

“For behold, saith the Lord,” this 1837 inscription reads, a “very fierce and very terrible war is near at hand, even at your doors. Therefore, make haste, saith the Lord, O ye my people, and gather yourselves together, and be at peace among yourselves, or there shall be no safety for you.”

A rare glimpse at Smith’s teachings on polygamy

Joseph Smith, top left, and some of his purported wives, clockwise from top middle: Emma Hale Smith; Eliza R. Snow; Martha McBride (Knight Smith Kimball); Marinda Nancy Johnson (Hyde Smith); and Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs (Smith Young).

Most historians believe Smith married about three dozen women before his death in 1844. And yet, “precious little” from the Latter-day Saint prophet exists today, Smoot and Passantino write, regarding the controversial practice of polygamy .

An uncanonized 1842 revelation addressed to one of the first bishops of the fledgling faith, Newel K. Whitney , provides a rare glimpse into the vaulted blessings Smith taught were associated with those who entered in these weblike unions.

Recorded the day Smith married Whitney’s 17-year-old daughter, Sarah Ann , the dictation affirms that “the thing that my servant Joseph Smith has made known unto you and your family, and which you have agreed upon, is right in mine eyes, and shall be crowned upon your heads with honor and immortality and eternal life to all your house, both old and young.”

The revelation goes on to provide Newel Whitney with the steps and language he should use when wedding the couple, explaining that the couple should take each other by the hand and pledge “to be each other’s companion so long as you both shall live…and also throughout eternity.”

The father is told, as part of the ceremony, to then bestow on his young daughter “all those powers” associated with the priesthood and to close with the words, “let immortality and eternal life henceforth be sealed upon your heads forever and ever.”

About the project

(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Volumes of the landmark Joseph Smith Papers project fill the shelves.

Smoot and Passantino are hardly the first to attempt to publish all of Smith’s uncanonized revelations in one book. They are the first, however, to undertake such a project since the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers, a massive effort to grant unprecedented access to the writings and teachings that the faith founder produced during his life.

To determine what counted as an uncanonized revelation, the authors asked several questions of the material. First: Has it been published and later pulled from the collection of Latter-day Saint scripture canon known as the “standard works”? If so, it was out. Second: Were there any questions about the document originating from Joseph Smith? Ditto on these. Finally, writings like meeting notes, journal entries and the like were generally tossed unless they contained “revelatory pronouncements.” So, too, were larger projects, such as Smith’s edits to the Bible.

Their ultimate goal for all of this?

To strengthen belief in Smith’s prophetic call, spur scholarship and, finally, “bear witness to the reality of ongoing revelation as the voice of the Lord being heard in the latter days.”

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The Supreme Court Walks Back Clarence Thomas’ Guns Extremism

The Supreme Court upheld a federal law disarming domestic abusers on Friday, significantly narrowing a radical 2022 precedent in the process. Its 8–1 ruling in U.S. v. Rahimi is a major victory for gun safety laws, a much-needed reprieve after two years of unceasing hostility from the federal judiciary. Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion walked back maximalist rhetoric—recklessly injected into the law by Justice Clarence Thomas—that had imperiled virtually every modern regulation limiting access to firearms. Thomas was the lone dissenter, signifying the rest of the court’s mad dash away from his extremist position on the Second Amendment.

Rahimi involves a violent criminal, Zackey Rahimi, who beat his girlfriend, then fired shots at either her or a witness as she fled his abuse. His girlfriend subsequently obtained a restraining order from a state court that found that he posed “a credible threat” to her “physical safety.” Rahimi, however, continued harassing her, threatened a different woman with a firearm, and was identified as the suspect in at least five additional shootings. When the police searched his apartment, they found a pistol, a rifle, ammunition, and a copy of the restraining order.

Rahimi was indicted under a federal law that bars individuals from possessing firearms while subject to a restraining order for domestic violence. He argued that this statute violated his Second Amendment rights, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5 th Circuit agreed . The court rested its analysis on New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen , the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision establishing a constitutional right to carry firearms in public. Thomas’ opinion in Bruen , though, went much further than that specific holding, declaring that all restrictions on the right to bear arms are presumptively unconstitutional unless they have a sufficient set of “historical analogues” from the distant past. (He didn’t bother to clarify the precise era, but it seemed to be sometime between 1791 and 1868.)

That approach posed two fundamental problems, which the lower courts quickly encountered when trying to apply Bruen : First, judges are not historians and cannot parse the complex, often incomplete record in this area with any consistency or reliability; and second, modern problems require modern solutions , especially when past bigotry prevented lawmakers from perceiving those problems in the first place. Rahimi is Exhibit A: Men were generally permitted to abuse their wives in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, with courts hesitant to interfere with what they deemed a private “familial affair.” Countless other examples have arisen in the lower courts since Bruen , with judges creating new rights to scratch the serial number off guns and own firearms while using illegal substances .

Roberts attempted to put a stop to this chaos on Friday. His Rahimi opinion cut back Bruen at every turn. “Some courts,” the chief justice wrote, “have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases. These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.” Rather than hunt for perfect historical analogs, courts should ask “whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.” If old laws regulated guns to “address particular problems, that will be a strong indicator that contemporary laws imposing similar restrictions for similar reasons fall within a permissible category of regulations.” Today’s regulations should generally avoid imposing restrictions “beyond what was done at the founding,” but the modern law need not “precisely match its historical precursors.” Roberts’ test significantly broadens (or perhaps loosens) the constitutional inquiry beyond what Bruen allowed. It instructs courts to look at principles , at a fairly high level of generality, rather than demanding a near-perfect match from centuries past.

The difference between Rahimi and Bruen is perfectly captured by Roberts’ majority opinion and the lone dissent written by Bruen ’s own author, Thomas. The chief justice asserted, “The government offers ample evidence that the Second Amendment permits the disarmament of individuals who pose a credible threat to the physical safety of others.” He breezily walked through a smattering of history allowing for the seizure of arms to preserve “public order.” For proof, Roberts cited surety laws, legislation that required an individual “suspected of future misbehavior” to post a bond, which he would forfeit if he engaged in misconduct. Domestic abusers could, in theory, be subject to the surety system, as could individuals who misused firearms—and that was good enough for Roberts. To him, this evidence established a historical practice of “preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms.” And disarming abusers “fits comfortably within this tradition.”

To Thomas, by contrast, surety laws “are worlds—not degrees—apart” from the law in question, because they were civil (not criminal) measures that did not actually disarm people but merely threatened them with a fine. These laws “did not alter an individual’s right to keep and bear arms,” Thomas protested, and they therefore failed to establish a relevant “history and tradition.” Indeed, “the government does not identify even a single regulation with an analogous burden and justification,” he complained in dissent. In 1791 a man like Zackey Rahimi could be disarmed only after a conviction for a violent crime. And so, Thomas wrote, that must remain the rule today.

Bruen was a 6–3 decision. Yet every justice who joined Thomas’ opinion in Bruen in 2022 signed on to Roberts’ walk back of Bruen on Friday. What happened? Aside from Justice Samuel Alito, every remaining member of the court expressed their views by writing or joining separate concurrences in Rahimi . Justice Brett Kavanaugh tried to defend his beloved “history and tradition” test, as opposed to “a balancing test that churns out the judge’s own policy beliefs,” while creating more room for “precedent” (or “the accumulated wisdom of jurists”). Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that Bruen “demands a wider lens” than the 5 th Circuit deployed, explaining that “historical regulations reveal a principle, not a mold,” and do not forever lock us into “late-18 th -century policy choices.” Justice Neil Gorsuch tried to split the difference, marshaling a defense of Bruen while subtly reworking it to limit sweeping legal attacks on gun regulations.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, celebrated the majority’s focus on “principles” instead of perfect analogs. “History has a role to play in Second Amendment analysis,” she wrote, “but a rigid adherence to history, (particularly history predating the inclusion of women and people of color as full members of the polity), impoverishes constitutional interpretation and hamstrings our democracy.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who joined the court soon after Bruen came down, warned that Rahimi will not end the “increasingly erratic and unprincipled body of law” that Bruen inspired. “The blame” for the lower courts’ struggles “may lie with us,” she noted, “not with them.” All three liberals sound ready and willing to overturn Bruen altogether if they get the chance—but will, for now, settle for Rahimi ’s compromise.

What next? The Supreme Court will have to vacate a spate of lower court decisions that used Bruen to strike down seemingly sensible gun safety laws, ordering a do-over in light of Rahimi . Some courts will gladly accept the message. Others, like the lawless 5 th Circuit , will probably interpret Thomas’ dissent on Friday as the law and refuse to change their tune. Such defiance will test the majority’s commitment to a more workable and balanced Second Amendment jurisprudence—and likely fracture the court once more. By replacing Thomas’ hard-line views with a more malleable standard, SCOTUS has ended one battle over guns. But by remaining in this area, where it has no right to be in the first place, the court has invited a thousand more.

This is part of  Opinionpalooza , Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. Alongside  Amicus , we kicked things off this year by explaining  How Originalism Ate the Law . The best way to support our work is by joining  Slate Plus . (If you are already a member, consider a  donation  or  merch !)