【5/2 今日美史】麦卡锡传奇

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5/2

When

Where

Who

What

When： May 2, 1957

What：

Senator Joseph McCarthy succumbed to illness exacerbated by alcoholism and passed away.

Why

significant

McCarthy had been a key figure in the anticommunist hysteria popularly known as the “Red Scare” that engulfed the U.S. in the years following World War II.

McCarthy was born in a small town in Wisconsin in 1908. In 1946 he became the junior senator from Wisconsin. His early career in the Senate was unremarkable, to say the least. In 1950, desperate for an issue he could use to bolster his chances for re-election, McCarthy turned to the issue of communists in the U.S. even though he knew few details about the subject. In February 1950 he stunned an audience with the declaration that there were over 200 “known communists” in the Department of State.

Over the next four years, McCarthy became the most famous “Red-hunter.” Combining a flair for the dramatic with a penchant for wild and reckless charges, McCarthy was soon ruining careers, cowing opponents into silence, and titillating the American public with his accusations of communism. In all of the hysteria, however, few noticed that McCarthy never uncovered a single communist, in or out of the U.S. government.

In 1954, with his political fortunes beginning to ebb, McCarthy seriously overreached himself when he charged that the U.S. Army was “soft on communists.” In the famous televised Army-McCarthy hearings of that year, the American public got a first-hand view of McCarthy’s bullying and recklessness. The hearings destroyed McCarthy’s credibility and, though he continued to hold office, effectively ended his power in the Senate.

Tags

Red Scare, McCarthyism