Search results
6 days ago · Joseph McCarthy, U.S. senator who lent his name to McCarthyism. He dominated the U.S. political climate in the early 1950s through his sensational but unproven charges of communist subversion in high government circles. In 1954 his Senate colleagues officially censured him for unbecoming conduct.
Journalists, intellectuals, and even many of Eisenhower’s friends and close advisers agonized over what they saw as Ike’s timid approach to McCarthyism. The paranoia about the internal Communist threat—what we call the Red Scare—reached a fever pitch between 1950 and 1954, when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, a right-wing Republican ...
McCarthyism is part of the Red Scare period of American history in the late 1940s and 1950s. During that time, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy produced a series of investigations and hearings to expose supposed communist infiltration of various areas of the U.S. government.
Popularly known as “McCarthyism” after Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), who made himself famous in 1950 by claiming that large numbers of Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, the second Red Scare in fact predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single politician.
Oct 29, 2009 · Joseph R. McCarthy, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, is best known for his high-profile attempts to expose communists in the U.S. government during the 1950s.
[The American Heritage Dictionary gives the definition of McCarthyism as: 1. The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence; and 2. The use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition.]
McCarthy capitalized on national paranoia by proclaiming that communist spies were omnipresent and that he was America's only salvation. An atmosphere of fear of world domination by communists hung over America in the postwar years.
