“Are you or have you been a member of the Communist Party?”
With this question Joseph Raymond McCarthy, a little-known Republican senator from the central United States, became a stellar figure in his country’s politics in the early 1950s.
The question was the center of the arsenal that the legislator used in his campaign to unmask the numerous communists and Soviet spies who – according to him – were infiltrated in the universities, in Hollywood, in the government bureaucracy and even in the army with the purpose of “destroy our great democracy from within”.
However, the refusal to answer this and the other questions that McCarthy asked those who convened his all-powerful Permanent Investigations Subcommittee became sufficient evidence to convict, officially or unofficially, numerous people and opened the doors to a dark era. which historians and political scientists have called “McCarthyism”. A word that today is synonymous with repression and persecution for ideological reasons.
But how did this senator manage to launch this witch hunt? Why did no one stop him and what consequences did his actions have on politics and civil rights in the US? To answer these, BBC Mundo spoke with three historians and reviewed documents from the time.
A turncoat who took advantage of the opportunity
McCarthy was born in Wisconsin, in the north central United States, in November 1908 into a humble family. As a young man he had to leave school to work on a farm, but he returned to school at the age of 19 and ended up graduating as a lawyer.
His public career began as a judge in 1939. and during World War II he served in the army, reads his biography published on the Senate website. At the end of the war he entered politics, first as a Democrat and then joined the Republican Party. And by 1946 he was already a senator.
Despite his rapid rise, he was not considered a relevant political figure nor was there any indication that he would be.
“The beginning of his career was not particularly brilliant, he did not have a great speech nor did he come from a relevant state (…) However, he took advantage the climate of hysteria and collective paranoia prevailing in the United States in the early 1950s to make a name for themselves,” Francisco Soto, professor of US History at the University of Los Andes (Venezuela), explained to BBC Mundo.
By 1949, two events called into question the aura of undefeatability with which the Americans emerged after the Second World War: The news, in August, that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had nuclear weapons and the victory, in October, of Mao Tse Tung’s communists in China.
“How was the most powerful country losing the Cold War? Right-wing politicians, businessmen and journalists attributed these inexplicable failures to a conspiracy orchestrated by the Communist Party USA., which followed orders from the USSR,” said historian Ellen Schrecker, co-author of the book “The Age of McCarthyism.”
In this context, in February 1950 McCarthy made the front pages of newspapers, thanks to a speech he gave at a rally in a small town in the northeastern state of West Virginia.
“While I cannot take the time to name all the men within the State Department who have been identified as members of the Communist Party and a spy network, I can say that I have in my hand I have a list with 205 names”, he declared while holding a sheet of paper in one of his hands.
A lie told a thousand times
As time has passed, researchers have found no evidence that McCarthy’s famous list existed.
“He was an opportunistic politician, very ambitious and unscrupulous who he didn’t care about the truth“, the historian told BBC Mundo.
However, this complaint and other similar ones that he made later allowed the senator to gain popularity and chair a parliamentary subcommittee that would seek to unmask the alleged Soviet and communist spies infiltrated in the country.
This new body joined the controversial Committee on Un-American Activities that had been persecuting academics, writers and Hollywood stars since the late 1930s for their alleged sympathies with the ideas of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
“McCarthyism, understood as the anti-communist witch hunt, type Spanish Inquisition, within the US, was underway before McCarthy appearedbut it was reinforced with it,” Schrecker added.
During the government of Democrat Harry Truman (1945-1953), congressional hearings were held against alleged spies, and the “loyalty program” was launched, which included investigations and interrogations of public officials who were suspected of being communists.
The great allies
In addition to the international context, internal factors contributed to McCarthy’s rise. The media was one of those elements.
“The massification of television allowed the politician to spread his anti-communist message and above all the fear of a possible Soviet attack on the United States,” said Professor Soto.
Schrecker spoke in similar terms, asserting that McCarthy knew how “play with journalists”.
“I knew the closing hours of the newspapers and that I had to announce in the afternoon that I had discovered 20 spies within the army or make other scandalous statements, because then the journalists They would not have time to verify the information and discover that it was lying”, accurate.
For his part, the historian of the Complutense University of Madrid, Luis Martínez del Campo, attributed McCarthy’s communication notoriety to his use of demagoguery.
“He did not hesitate to resort to falsehoods or conspiracy theories and to publicly point out his opponents, for other things, undermine political pluralism”, said.
And, for this reason, the researcher of Contemporary History described McCarthy as “a pioneer of right-wing populism.”
The other element in the equation that favored the senator was a person: J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI (the American investigative police) and who was a furious anti-communist.
“Hoover played the most important role in the rise and consolidation of McCarthyism. If we had wanted to name this phenomenon after someone, it should have been Hoover.”Schrecker asserted.
The police chief became famous for ordering the monitoring and espionage of influential people, often without a court order; and for using the information collected to extort one of his targets.
“The FBI looked for any sign of communism in institutions, universities and cinema. The files that the FBI made of both Albert Einstein and Charles Chaplin account for this. They were investigations that sought to link these prominent figures with communism,” Soto added.
A real danger or an excuse?
“A communist inside a military equipment factory, inside a university or inside the State Department is too many.”
With these words, spoken in 1952, McCarthy made clear his conviction of the seriousness of the communist threat. But how serious was the risk?
Cases such as that of the Rosenberg couple, executed in 1953 for passing nuclear secrets to the USSR, show that the Kremlin had eyes and ears inside the United States. However, experts consulted by the BBC World assure that the danger was overstated.
“In the case of the United States, the Communist Party was made up of intellectuals and thinkers who criticized the economic and social model, but in truth They were not seeking power“Soto said.
For his part, Martínez del Campo asserted: “Nothing indicates that there was a great conspiracy to overthrow the government.”
The experts also agreed that McCarthy’s investigations and hearings did not serve to reveal a single Soviet spy nor to identify any American communist who had conspired against his country. However, they did achieve other objectives.
“McCarthyism was a purge that destroyed the American left and hit organizations that were affiliated or associated with causes defended by communism, such as unions or groups that promoted civil rights (against racial discrimination),” Schrecker stated.
We have encountered the army
Failure to appear before the subcommittee chaired by McCarthy or the Un-American Activities subcommittee or refusing to answer their questions was synonymous with guilt. And, therefore, those who chose silence were fired and in some cases imprisoned.
Professor Schrecker estimates that Until 1957, between 12,000 and 15,000 Americans suffered some type of persecution for their ideas..
How could this happen? How did a lawyer violate basic principles of law such as the presumption of innocence and due process and why did no one stop him? “It was said that the threat from the USSR was so serious that some of the principles of the rule of law should be ignored or twisted,” the historian explained.
“What made McCarthyism so powerful and different from other political persecutions in more authoritarian countries is that there was little violence.“Only two people died (the Rosenberg couple),” said the expert.
“The main penalty for being a communist was economic: people were fired from their jobs and were prevented from getting other jobs,” he said.
The possibility of being accused of being a communist or a traitor by the senator prevented many of those who could confront him from doing so, including presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961).
“I won’t get into the gutter with that guy.”the president replied to someone who once urged him to put the controversial senator in his place, reads a letter available in the Eisenhower Presidential Library.
However, McCarthy’s luck began to run out in the spring of 1954 when he launched an investigation against the US military for allegedly harboring communists in its ranks.
The accusations, without evidence and sometimes cont radictories, as well as his aggressive style, were contested by the armed institution. “Don’t you know what decency is?”the army lawyer snapped in front of the television cameras.
Thereafter, Eisenhower authorized government officials to ignore the subcommittee’s subpoenas, which undermined the senator’s authority.
“McCarthy’s attacks on the military were the beginning of his end”Because that institution was highly appreciated by the American people, we cannot forget that they recently defeated Nazism and prevented the entire Korean peninsula from ending up in the hands of the communists,” Soto pointed out.
Alive and strengthened
Months after his controversial hearings against the army, the Senate censured the attitude of McCarthy, who discredited he died of alcoholism in 1957.
However, the experts consulted believe that the way of doing politics that made the controversial character famous did not disappear with him.
“Just look at the laws being passed in some Republican-governed states, which authorize teachers to be fired if they teach that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Or the arrests of hundreds of students for peacefully protesting against the War in Gaza. “This is totalitarianism,” Schrecker lamented.
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