254 a short history of the united states
October 1949. Taking advantage of the widespread corruption in the
Nationalist Party of General Chiang Kai-shek, Communist rebels led
by Mao Tse-tung drove Chiang and his Nationalist army from the
mainland to the island of Taiwan off the coast of China. Truman did
not intervene to assist Chiang in the struggle, and he was accused of
providing indirect aid to the Communists. In Congress, two
Republicans—Walter H. Judd of Minnesota in the House and Wil-
liam Knowland of California in the Senate—accused the Truman ad-
ministration of virtually handing China over to the Communists. The
reason, they claimed, was the fact that the U.S. State Department and
Foreign Service were riddled with active members of the Communist
Party.
The disaster in China occurred just as new revelations were reported
about a widespread Soviet spy network in the United States through
which atomic and other scientific secrets were transmitted to the com-
munists. On March 22 , 1947 , Truman directed the FBI to investigate
the loyalty of federal employees, and over the next four years about 200
individuals were dismissed as security risks and another 2 , 000 re-
signed. Not only did Alger Hiss, who had held an important position
in the State Department, stand trial for allegedly turning over secret
government documents to a former Soviet courier and found guilty of
perjury, but Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried, convicted, and ex-
ecuted for helping the Soviets obtain information about building an
atomic bomb.
The panic over the infiltration of communists into the government
worsened when Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin
gave a speech on February 9 , 1950 , at a Republican Women’s Club in
the McClure Hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia, and said that he held
in his hand a list of 205 names of card-carrying communists in the
State Department. Newspapers around the country picked up the ac-
cusation and brought the senator the national attention he craved.
When it was subsequently shown that the statement was false, McCarthy
increased the virulence of his attacks by accusing a number of political
leaders, including General George Marshall, of treason. As chairman
of a Senate investigating committee, he falsely and recklessly turned
his outrageous attacks against members of his own party as well as
Democrats. His investigation of the army finally led the Senate, by a