McCarthyism began before McCarthy, and some historians prefer to call it Hooverism
The Red Scare named after Senator Joseph McCarthy was already under way when he waved his list in 1950: Truman's loyalty screening of federal workers started in 1947. Careers were wrecked on flimsy evidence, many verdicts and laws were later overturned, and some historians now argue the label overstates one senator's role.
The ground had been prepared for decades. The First Red Scare of 1917–20 left a lasting fear of radicals, and conservatives had long branded reforms such as child labour laws, votes for women and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as red plots. The Communist Party of the United States grew through the Depression until its membership topped out near 75,000 in 1940–41. On March 21, 1947, President Truman's Executive Order 9835 ordered loyalty screening of every federal civil servant, partly, it seems, to answer conservative critics after Republican gains in the 1946 elections.
Events then fed the anxiety. The Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley cases raised Soviet espionage in 1945. In 1949 the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb sooner than analysts expected and Mao Zedong's forces took mainland China; the Korean War followed in 1950. That January the State Department official Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury for denying he had spied, in Britain Klaus Fuchs admitted passing Manhattan Project secrets, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested, later to be executed in 1953.
McCarthy's moment came on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, when he held up a paper he said named 205 communists still working at the State Department. Press coverage exploded. The Christian Science Monitor printed the word McCarthyism on March 28, 1950, and the cartoonist Herblock used it the next day. Congressional committees, including the HUAC, ran 109 investigations between 1949 and 1954, and loyalty boards and private firms screened workers too. Civil servants, entertainers, academics, left-wing politicians and union activists lost jobs, and some went to prison.
The tide turned as several of McCarthy's charges proved false. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn his conduct, and rulings by the Supreme Court under Earl Warren struck down key laws. Since the 1980s historians have questioned the name itself; Ellen Schrecker suggests Hooverism, after FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Documents released after the Cold War did confirm real Soviet spying in America, though McCarthy had failed to identify many of the actual agents.
Source: McCarthyism
