Joseph McCarthy
Joe McCarthy was an undistinguished first term Senator from Wisconsin when he delivered a speech in Wheeling West Virginia to a group of Republican women in which he brandished a piece of paper claiming it to be a list of State Department employees who were known members of the Communist Party. McCarthy is often quoted as claiming that the list – if he had one at all – contained 205 names, later he informed President Truman that it contained 57 names, and in a subsequent speech in the Senate the number was revised again, to 81 names.
The Senate assigned a subcommittee to investigate McCarthy’s charges. Meanwhile McCarthy, thoroughly pleased with himself and his newfound notoriety, continued to level charges against the State department in general and against specific individuals, although he offered no evidence and produced nothing to support his claims. The subcommittee, known as the Tydings Committee for Senator Millard Tydings who chaired it, found McCarthy’s accusations to be without merit, and called them a fraud and a hoax. Partisan Republican Senators rallied to McCarthy’s support and called the committee treasonous.
McCarthy didn’t stop with labeling whomever he wished as a communist, he also identified several individuals, usually through innuendo, as homosexuals at a time when homosexuality was illegal. The illegality of homosexual activity made those who practiced it subject to blackmail, or so the theory went at the time, and McCarthy’s push to have government agencies actively pursue removal from government employ anyone suspected of homosexual activity helped increase his fame and his approval rating. As with his accusations of communism, McCarthy offered no evidence to support his charges.
McCarthy’s shameless use of false accusations and unsupportable charges were played for the benefit of the press, creating news which the press dutifully reported but which neither they nor the Senator creating the stories could verify. The press was competing with the emerging medium of television, which needed content to fill its airtime, and McCarthy’s incendiary commentary and accusations provided plenty. Any Senator or reporter who failed to support McCarthy, or who had the temerity to oppose him, was quickly labeled a communist or a supporter of communism.
Because he chose to accuse his enemies of being communists McCarthy quickly received the support of the Roman Catholic Church, a staunch opponent of communism. As McCarthy gained power and prestige his false accusations and unsupportable attacks became more and more out of control, and the media which had published his fake news gradually turned against him. Edward R. Murrow, on television, presented McCarthy in a light not visible from the printed page, and one of the first practitioners of planned fake news found his career brought to an end. The Senate censured McCarthy for among several other things, multiple counts of fraud and deception.