The anti-communist movement associated with Joseph McCarthy was underway well before his election to the Senate in 1946. Though the American government had long worked to obstruct the presence of communists and socialists in American politics, this campaign took on unprecedented urgency after the Second World War.

The search for internal subversion was carried out by Congress through its House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), organized in 1938 and not abolished until 1975. Though relatively ineffective during the New Deal, after the war the committee stepped up its work, in part a response to President Harry Truman’s own increasingly strident anti-communist rhetoric and new internal security program. In fact, many scholars have argued that McCarthyism owed as much energy to the rivalry between the Democratic and Republican parties as it did to any “real” threat of communist influence over governmental policy.

Nationwide attention was given to HUAC in 1948 when, in front of a committee chaired by freshman California member of Congress Richard Nixon, Whittaker Chambers, a journalist and former member of the Communist Party accused Alger Hiss of passing classified documents to the Soviets during the 1930s. Hiss, a highly respected Democrat who held influential positions in the federal government during the New Deal, and who accompanied President Roosevelt to the Yalta conference in 1945, could not be tried for subversion; the statute of limitations had expired. But Hiss was convicted of lying to Congress, and to many the possibility of his guilt legitimated the search for subversives within the government. To those who doubted his guilt, however, the hearings resembled a witch-hunt devoid of any hard evidence linking Hiss to the accusations.

The search for communists was not limited to the federal government, but also included the entertainment industry, higher education and the nation’s literary community. Other targets of investigation and intimidation were American homosexuals, considered by some to be a poisonous presence by virtue of their sexual identity, just as communists were suspect for their political identity. In all, hundreds of lives were ruined by the careless and savage attacks made by a few overzealous men wielding substantial power.

The anti-communist crusade was linked to Joseph McCarthy in early 1950, after he claimed in a speech given in Wheeling, West Virginia, to have a list of 205 known communists working in the federal government. Though the number of “communists” McCarthy claimed to have identified changed over the next few years, what proved relevant for most Americans was the accusations themselves rather than their validity.

McCarthy’s influence ended suddenly in 1954 when he made the mistake of investigating the presence of communists in the United States Army. A more absurd accusation could not have been made. The fact that a Republican was now in the White House signaled to many Republicans that McCarthy was now more of a liability than an asset to their party. Televised hearings revealed McCarthy to be a vulgar and disrespectful man, and his basis of support quickly evaporated. Censured by the Senate in 1954, McCarthy receded into obscurity and died an alcoholic in 1957.