McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1950s

A Country in Fear

In 1945 the United States was the only nuclear power. By 1949 the Soviet Union had its own atomic bomb, China had become Communist, and confidential American documents were appearing in Soviet archives. In June 1950 Communist North Korea invaded the South. To many ordinary Americans, the Cold War looked as if it were being lost from the inside — betrayed by spies, intellectuals and Hollywood writers. The result was the second great Red Scare, which dominated American politics from 1947 to 1954. Its central figure was a Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, but the machinery of fear was much wider than one man.

HUAC and the Hollywood Ten

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), originally founded in 1938, became a major political force in October 1947 when it began investigating alleged Communist influence in Hollywood. HUAC summoned 41 writers, directors and actors. Most cooperated; ten refused on First Amendment grounds to answer the question ‘are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’. The Hollywood Ten were jailed for contempt of Congress for between six and twelve months.

Hollywood studios, terrified of losing audiences, responded with the ‘Waldorf Statement’ in November 1947 announcing they would not employ Communists. Around 320 entertainment-industry workers were eventually blacklisted; many never worked under their own names again. Charlie Chaplin lost his US re-entry permit in 1952 and never returned. Composer Hanns Eisler was deported. Actor Larry Parks confessed Communist Party membership and was blacklisted anyway. The blacklist demonstrated that fear of being seen to be soft on Communism could make private companies enforce political loyalty more harshly than the state itself.

Hiss and the Rosenbergs

Two espionage cases convinced wavering Americans that the threat was real. Alger Hiss, a former senior State Department official who had attended the 1945 Yalta Conference with Roosevelt, was accused by ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers in August 1948 of passing documents to the USSR in the 1930s. After two trials Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950 and sentenced to five years. The case was driven by a young Republican congressman named Richard Nixon, and it made his career.

In July 1950 Julius Rosenberg, a New York electrical engineer, was arrested on charges of passing American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. His wife Ethel was arrested three weeks later, on 11 August. Both were convicted in March 1951 and executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing in June 1953 — the only Americans executed for espionage in peacetime. Modern declassified Soviet cables (the Venona project) confirm Julius’s espionage; Ethel’s role is more disputed and historians broadly agree she was overcharged. At the time, the case appeared to confirm that Communist subversion reached into American homes.

McCarthy’s Rise, 1950–54

On 9 February 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin gave a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia. He waved a piece of paper and claimed it listed 205 known Communists working in the State Department. He never produced the list. The number changed in subsequent speeches (57, then 81). It did not matter. McCarthy’s claim, made at the moment of maximum Cold War anxiety, dominated the news cycle and built him a national following.

Through 1950 to 1954 McCarthy hunted alleged Communists in the State Department, the Voice of America, the Government Printing Office, the Army and even the libraries of US embassies abroad; from 1953 he did it as chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. Witnesses were summoned, careers ended, accusations broadcast. Few Senate colleagues challenged him in public — he had become electorally dangerous. Republican nominee Dwight Eisenhower, campaigning in Wisconsin in October 1952, dropped a planned defence of his friend General George Marshall (whom McCarthy had accused of pro-Communist sympathies) rather than confront McCarthy. The press largely repeated McCarthy’s charges without checking them. Eisenhower privately disliked him but refused to attack him by name, telling his staff he would not get in the gutter with that guy.

The Army-McCarthy Hearings and Decline

McCarthy’s overreach was the Army. In 1954 he turned his accusations on the US Army for protecting an alleged Communist dentist. The Senate televised the hearings between April and June 1954. For 36 days, an audience of around 20 million Americans watched McCarthy bully witnesses, contradict himself and lose his temper. The decisive moment came on 9 June 1954, when Army counsel Joseph Welch confronted him with the now-famous question: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?’. Public approval of McCarthy collapsed from around 50% in January 1954 to around 35% by June.

In December 1954 the Senate voted 67–22 to formally censure McCarthy for ‘conduct unbecoming’. He remained a senator but his power was broken. He drank heavily and died of liver failure in May 1957 aged 48. His name became a byword for unsubstantiated political smear — ‘McCarthyism’. The Hollywood blacklist persisted into the 1960s, lifted gradually as Dalton Trumbo and others wrote under their own names again. Federal loyalty programmes were scaled back but not abolished.