THE ANTICOMMUNIST CRUSADE ★^931an embarrassment to the party after the election of Republican Dwight D.
Eisenhower as president in 1952. But McCarthy did not halt his campaign. He
even questioned Eisenhower’s anticommunism.
Few political figures had the courage to speak up against McCarthy’s cru-
sade. One who did was Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the Senate’s only
woman member. On June 1, 1950, soon after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech,
Smith addressed the Senate with what she called a “declaration of conscience.”
She did not name McCarthy, but few could mistake the target of her condemna-
tion of a “campaign of hate and character assassination.” Most of her colleagues,
however, remained silent.
McCarthy’s downfall came in 1954, when a Senate committee investi-
gated his charges that the army had harbored and “coddled” communists. The
nationally televised Army- McCarthy hearings revealed McCarthy as a bully
who browbeat witnesses and made sweeping accusations with no basis in fact.
The dramatic high point came when McCarthy attacked the loyalty of a young
attorney in the firm of Joseph Welch, the army’s chief lawyer. “Let us not assas-
sinate this lad further,” Welch pleaded. “You have done enough. Have you no
sense of decency, sir?” After the hearings ended, the Republican- controlled Sen-
ate voted to “condemn” McCarthy for his behavior. He died three years later. But
the word “McCarthyism” had entered the political vocabulary, a shorthand for
character assassination, guilt by association, and abuse of power in the name of
anticommunism.
An Atmosphere of Fear
By the early 1950s, the anticommunist crusade had created a pervasive atmo-
sphere of fear. One commentator described Washington, D.C., as a city rife with
“spying, suspicion, [and] defamation by rumor,” with “democratic freedoms”
at risk as power slipped into the hands of those “whose values are the values
of dictatorship and whose methods are the methods of the police state.” But
anticommunism was as much a local as a national phenomenon. States cre-
ated their own committees, modeled on HUAC, that investigated suspected
communists and other dissenters. States and localities required loyalty oaths
of teachers, pharmacists, and members of other professions, and they banned
communists from fishing, holding a driver’s license, and, in Indiana, working
as a professional wrestler.
Private organizations like the American Legion, National Association of
Manufacturers, and Daughters of the American Revolution also persecuted
individuals for their beliefs. The Better America League of southern Califor-
nia gathered the names of nearly 2 million alleged subversives in the region.
Previous membership in organizations with communist influence or even
participation in campaigns in which communists had taken part, such as the
What effects did the anticommunism of the Cold War have on American politics and culture?