The role of partisan politics in the spread of McCarthyism

Part A: Plan of the Investigation

The end of the Second World War in 1945 saw the United States lose two enemies in Germany and Japan, but gain a new one in the Soviet Union – the Cold War had begun. Although the majority of Americans had always opposed communism, the States experienced a particularly extreme and severe period of anti-communism lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. This period became known as ‘McCarthyism’, a word derived from U.S. Republican Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy was seen by many as “a ruthless and irresponsible political opportunist, a demagogue and a totalitarian” 1 and McCarthyism is now remembered as a time of fear and uncertainty when fundamental civil liberties were downtrodden under the guise of national security.

In researching this appalling period in American history, I hope to uncover not only what factors gave way to the rise of McCarthyism, but more specifically, the role partisan politics played in allowing and encouraging McCarthyism to spread.

Research will be conducted using a variety of books including The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism by Haynes Johnson, Seeds of repression; Harry S. Truman and the origins of McCarthyism by Athan Theoharis, and The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents by Ellen Schrecker. I will also be using a collection of essays entitled McCarthyism, edited by Thomas C. Reeves.

Part B: Summary of Evidence

McCarthy and McCarthyism rose to prominence at a time when large numbers of Americans were shocked and frustrated by the course of current events. The beginning of the Cold War and the fear of Communism prompted the introduction of the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HCUA) in 1938, a committee of Congress set up to investigate people suspected of unpatriotic behavior. 2 It also propelled the passing of the Smith Act under the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in 1940, which made it illegal for anyone in the United States to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government. 3 Despite these institutions, however, Communist allegations began to increase. In 1945, the discovery of classified government documents in the offices of a Communist magazine sent shock waves through the country, 4 and the following year, Soviet spy rings were uncovered in Canada sending atomic secrets and uranium samples to Moscow. In August 1948, testimony before the HCUA linked scores of Americans with Soviet espionage, including a one-time assistant to President Roosevelt, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and a former State Department official. 5

These spy cases and Republican charges helped prompt the administration under President Harry S. Truman to wage an intensive drive against Communist espionage and infiltration. In March 1947, Truman issued an Executive Order creating a new loyalty program for the federal government, requesting an investigation of all federal employees by the FBI. 6 In 1948, the Department of Justice convicted eleven leaders of the American Communist Party for violating the Smith Act and conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the United States, and later won convictions against some 40 additional Communist leaders. 7 The repressive nature of the Truman Administration, however, could not rival that of the paranoid US government after Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy capitalized on the Americans’ concerns about Communism in 1950.

McCarthy’s meteoric rise to national fame came when, on February 9, 1950, during a speech made to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, he made the claim of having a list of 205 members of the Communist Party working in the State Department (he later changed this number to 57). 8

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After this speech, McCarthy gained widespread support, unsurprisingly from right-wing anti-communist groups such as the American Legion and Christian fundamentalists 9 and with the backing of conservative Republicans, who wielded the expedient issue of Communist infiltration to gain Congress in 1950. 10 McCarthy made one sensational, unsubstantiated allegation after another: Dr. Owen Lattimore, a respected scholar at Johns Hopkins University, was labeled the ‘head of an espionage ring in the State Department’, 11 noted Hollywood entertainment industry personalities were accused of Communist Party connections, and throughout the campaign to elect Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in 1952, the Democrats and Truman were harshly criticized for their ‘softness’ on Communism and for being “dangerous liberals”. 12

McCarthyism in its severest form, however, resulted in the passing of the McCarran Act in 1950, an internal security act allowing for the detention of dangerous, disloyal, or subversive persons in times of ‘national security emergency’. 13 Although Truman called the bill "the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly” 14, the Democratic Congress overrode his veto in order to pass the bill. 15

Part C: Evaluation of Sources

The two sources investigated in this section will be McCarthyism, edited by Thomas C. Reeves, and The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism by Haynes Johnson.

McCarthyism is essentially a collection of 12 short essays and excerpts by 14 different historians ranging in time periods from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, compiled and edited by Thomas C. Reeves, a professor and Senior Fellow of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. The purpose of this collection is to allow for the different points of view concerning McCarthyism ‘in the hope that students will be less inclined to select the “right one” than to think about and discuss the varied dimensions of one of the more controversial phenomena of recent American history’, 16 as is mentioned in Reeves’ introduction.

This source is invaluable especially in terms of historiographies because it succeeds entirely in its purpose of providing a variety of analyses of both McCarthy and McCarthyism by several valid modern American historians. The difference in time periods plays a large role in the diversity of the essays as some were written at the height of the age of McCarthyism, while others are written with the benefit of hindsight. The book’s greatest quality is that its essays comprise the entire political spectrum, and the organization of the book makes it easy to compare political views.

In terms of solely this topic, this book is an excellent source as many of the essays and excerpts discuss the different factors that played a role in the rise of McCarthyism, and there is an entire section of how partisan politics, specifically, affected the time period. The book’s limitation, however is that, while it does an admirable job covering the complexities of McCarthyism, there is no simple timeline or overview of events to refer to in order to understand several of the highly specific excerpts.

The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism is written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Haynes Johnson. The purpose of this source is to offer an account of the career of Joe McCarthy and to bring to light the questions raised by McCarthyism. In terms of research conducted for this particular topic, this source was satisfactory on some levels because the main issue dealt with is how a little-known freshman senator from Wisconsin amass enough power to inspire such mass hysteria and even threaten two respected presidents.

However, there are several limitations to this source. It did not specifically address partisan politics as a factor, and much of the book is written almost as a biography of McCarthy. While quite entertaining, especially when comparing McCarthyism to the recent antics of the George W. Bush Administration following 9/11, the main limitation of the source is that it is a highly personal account, from which the conclusions drawn are somewhat subjective. While this is understandable due to the fact that the author’s father was himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who stood up to McCarthy in the 1950s, the narrative style does not help to write an objective paper analyzing one of the key elements in the spread of McCarthyism.

Part D: Analysis

What is known about the factors that encouraged McCarthyism are that they were a combination of partisan politics, support from right-wing groups and the ‘complacent paranoia’ 17 of the American people, in that, although most of McCarthy’s accusations were unsubstantiated, the general public allowed themselves to fall into a state of unnecessary paranoia.

It is clear that the spread of McCarthyism was not based on any legitimate fear of Communist influence in America because, ironically, not only did the American Communist Party never have more than 100 000 members at any given time, but its political influence was already on the decline when McCarthy entered the national scene. 18 However, this did not diminish McCarthy’s popularity, as a Gallup Poll in 1954 indicated that 50% of the American people had a generally ‘favourable opinion’ of him. 19 Considering the roughness of his politics and the severity of his allegations, this is extraordinary. How far then did partisan politics, specifically, encourage such widespread support?

In order to answer this question, one must first analyze opinions on how other factors contributed to the issue. According to Harvard sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, it was the aquiescence of the American masses allowing McCarthy to gain a psychological hold on the country by supporting him despite the fact that McCarthy was blatantly hunting innocent people with no connection to Communism. As Raab states, ‘McCarthyism became more pertinent than usual for a large number of people . . . because he struck a nerve that was more than anti-communist. His anti-communism was a banner around which various segments of the population could marshall their preservatist discontents and their generalized uneasiness.‘ 20 It might be argued that this uneasiness was due to political events, specifically the Korean War, 21 but this idea is not substantiated because McCarthy never once went after North Korean, Chinese, Russian or even, seriously, American Communist spies. 22 His targets were mainly the American establishment – the stars and writers of Hollywood, the influential government positions, and the Harvard intellectuals. McCarthyism was able to rise because the general public latched onto his anti-elitism.

On the other hand, there is the viewpoint that McCarthyism was successful not through a mass movement but the successful mobilization of a few supportive groups. According to Berkely professor Michael Paul Rogin ‘[McCarthy] did not mobilize the masses at the polls or break through existing group cleavages’. 23 What he did do, Rogan says, was derive support not only from traditional right-wing groups such as the American Legion and Daughters of the American Revolution, but mostly from dispossessed and discontented groups. Historian Daniel Bell combines the Lipset and Raab mentality with Rogin’s ideas and observes that the groups (which included soured, conservative politicians, 24 the “new rich”, 25 middle – class ethnic groups, 26 and right-wing intellectuals 27) supported McCarthyism because of his stance against the intellectual and elite and, Bell and Rogin maintain, gave the Wisconsin senator such powerful support that they launched him high into the political stratosphere.

Within the factor of political partisanship itself, there are three different views. Athan Theoharis argues that the Truman Administration had much to do with the rise of McCarthyism because of its hard-line approach toward Russia and its penchant for overemphasizing the presence of Communist espionage in the federal beaurocracy. 28 Although Truman prided himself on being a liberal Democrat, Theoharis maintains that it was his willingness to concede some of the misconceptions of the Communist scare (known as the Red Scare) that led to the American state of uneasiness which easily transitioned into the American state of paranoia in the McCarthy era.

Earl Latham, on the other hand believes that McCarthyism was prompted by the Republican party’s wholly unexpected and enraging defeat in the presidential elections of 1948, which Democrat Truman won. By brandishing the convenient issue of Communist infiltration, conservative Republicans not only gained control of Congress by 1950, 27 but found a useful instrument in Joe McCarthy by backing and intensifying his drive against “internal subversion” and, essentially, the Democrats, with an eye to the elections of 1952. This idea is affirmed by the fact that the Republicans won the 1952 election with Dwight D. Eisenhower at the head of the party. 28 Essentially, McCarthyism was a right-wing tool for winning elections by smearing the liberal political opponents.

Finally, Richard Rovere justifies McCarthyism as a “bipartisan doctrine” with strong support among both Democratic party leaders and voters as well as Republicans. It is indeed surprising that, in 1950, not a single Senate Democrat voted against McCarthy’s condemnations of several influential American liberals. 29 Whether this is because they believed McCarthy in legitimate fear of the spread of Communism, or more because of a fear of McCarthy’s influence itself is not clear. What is clear is that the Democrats, even influential Senators such as Paul Douglas of Illinois, 30 went through the last Truman years and the first Eisenhower years without ever opposing, or even seriously addressing, McCarthy’s demagogic position. On the other hand, many Republicans did not like him (Eisenhower was famously exasperated with McCarthy), 31 but so great was the fear of him that in many cases, through Eisenhower’s first two years in office, they gave into McCarthy’s ridiculous allegations. It was only in 1954 that the Eisenhower Administration finally broke with McCarthy over his attacks on the U.S. Army, the institution Eisenhower had served Supreme Commander of during World War II. 32 In essence, McCarthy was as successful in immobilizing the Democratic Truman Administration as he later was in demoralizing the Republican Eisenhower Administration; the paralyzing fear he inspired in both parties led them to silence, further encouraging the rise of McCarthyism.

Part E: Conclusion

It is clear that partisan politics were a major factor in the spread of McCarthyism. The fact that there are three distinct opinions about this factor is in itself an indication that political partisanship played a key role. What I’ve been able to gather through analyzing the opinions on partisan politics itself is that Rovere’s view of McCarthyism as a bipartisan doctrine seems to most encompass what McCarthyism may have been about, because while the other two views have merits, they do not address their discrepancies. The Truman Administration did seem, with their anti-Communist foreign policy, to set the stage for McCarthyism, however Theoharis did not address the fact that Truman was against the McCarran Act, which was the single bill that really allowed McCarthyism to take off. The Republicans did indeed use McCarthy successfully to gain a more powerful position in government, but Latham does not account for the fact that the Republicans were as influenced by a fear of McCarthyism as McCarthy was used as a tool by them. The fact remains that the unwillingness of both the Democrats and Republicans to stand up to McCarthy allowed McCarthyism to take hold in America.

However, to assert that political partisanship, even bipartisanship, completely explains the spread of McCarthyism would be false. In the same way that the refusal of the political parties to stand up to McCarthy allowed McCarthyist influence into the government, the willingness of the American people to be led by an obvious demagoue allowed McCarthyist influence to spread across the country. While there were a few in the journalism and artistic communities that publicly denounced McCarthy, it is essentially the general American public with their ‘favourable view’ of him that really allowed for the rise of McCarthyism.

Part F: Bibliography

Bell, Daniel. “The Status Theory.” McCarthyism. Ed. Thomas C. Reeves. 2nd ed. New York: Robert E. Krieger, 1978. 106 – 117.
Haynes, Johnson. The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.
Latham, Earl. “Republicans and the Defeat of 1948.” McCarthyism. Ed. Thomas C. Reeves. 2nd ed. New York: Robert E. Krieger, 1978. 86 – 92.
Lipset, Seymour Martin and Earl Raab. “An Instrument Rather Than Creator.” McCarthyism. Ed. Thomas C. Reeves. 2nd ed. New York: Robert E. Krieger, 1978. 126 – 135.
Rogin, Michael Paul. “Pluralists and Agrarian Radicalism.” McCarthyism. Ed. Thomas C. Reeves. 2nd ed. New York: Robert E. Krieger, 1978. 118 – 125.
Rovere, Richard. “McCarthyism as a Bipartisan Doctrine.” McCarthyism. Ed. Thomas C. Reeves. 2nd ed. New York: Robert E. Krieger, 1978. 93 – 96.
Schrecker, Ellen. The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1994.
Theoharis, Athan. Seeds of repression; Harry S. Truman and the origins of McCarthyism. New York: Times Books, 1977.