Joseph McCarthy

Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican senator from Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread communist subversion. He alleged that numerous communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated institutions including the United States federal government and military, universities, and the film industry. Ultimately, he was censured by the Senate in 1954 for refusing to cooperate with and abusing members of the committee established to investigate whether or not he should be censured. The term "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities and came to refer to the post-war "Red Scare" period as a whole. Today, the term is used more broadly to refer to demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.

Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, McCarthy commissioned into the Marine Corps in 1942, where he served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron. Following the end of World War II, he attained the rank of major.

A Democrat until 1944, McCarthy ran for the U.S. Senate in 1946 as a Republican; he narrowly defeated incumbent Robert M. La Follette Jr. in the Republican primary and then prevailed over Democrat Howard McMurray in the general election by a 61% – 37% margin amidst a nationwide Republican wave. After three largely undistinguished years in the Senate, McCarthy suddenly rose to national fame in February 1950 when he asserted in a speech that he had a list of "members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" who were employed in the State Department. In the succeeding years, McCarthy made additional accusations of Communist infiltration into the State Department, the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voice of America, and the U.S. Army. He also used various charges of communism, communist sympathies, disloyalty, or sex crimes to attack a number of politicians and other individuals inside and outside of government. This included a concurrent "Lavender Scare" against suspected homosexuals, whose illicit sexual activity was presumed to make them vulnerable to blackmail by communists and others.