McCarthyism, name given to the period of the 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy produced a series of investigations and hearings in an effort to expose supposed communist infiltration of the U.S. government. McCarthyism reached its peak and began its decline during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954..

Republicans tended to like what McCarthy was doing and Democrats did not, though McCarthy had significant support from traditional Democratic ethnic groups, especially Catholics, as well as many unskilled workers and small-business owners. (McCarthy himself was a Catholic.) He had very little support among union activists and Jews.

Did you know? Along with the Army-McCarthy hearings, journalist Edward R. Murrow’s exposés of McCarthyism played an important role in the senator’s downfall. On March 9, 1954, millions of ...

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Joseph McCarthy was a junior Republican senator from Wisconsin still in his first term when he delivered the incendiary Lincoln Day speech that rocketed him to political stardom. Tensions between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union had been at a rolling boil since the end of World War II.Speaking on February 9, 1950, before the Republican ...

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, launched a series of highly publicized probes. Journalists, intellectuals, and even many of Eisenhower’s friends and close advisers agonized over what they saw as Ike’s timid approach to McCarthyism.

Joseph McCarthy was a U.S. senator who searched branches of the government for Communists, because he thought they infiltrated the government during the Cold War.He called out members of the Department of State. He was known as the leader of the Red Scare, the time when Americans believed the Communists were infiltrating the United States government.

McCarthyism was a term coined to describe activities associated with Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. He served in the Senate from 1947 to 1957. McCarthyism described the practice of publicly accusing government employees of disloyalty. In the American political lexicon, the term has its origin in a March 1950, Washington Post editorial cartoon by Herbert Block, who depicted ...

McCarthyism Facts - 15: Joseph McCarthy's career as a Republican Senator had a less than impressive start and he was accused of falsifying his war record and investigated for tax offences and for taking bribes from the Pepsi-Cola Company. Fearing he would lose his seat in the next election he looked for ways to increase his standing as a ...

McCarthy was born in a small town in Wisconsin in 1908. In 1942, he joined the Marines and served in the Pacific during World War II. He returned home in 1944 and decided to start a career in ...

McCarthy did not anticipate, and was taken aback by the massive media response to it. From Wheeling, McCarthy flew to Salt Lake City. While changing planes in Denver, he was surrounded by reporters eager to see the list of communists. McCarthy agreed to show them the list, and then claimed to have left it in his baggage on the plane.