Joseph McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy was a United States senator whose four-year campaign against alleged communists in government gave its name to a form of political persecution. Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1908, he left school at fourteen, ran a chicken farm and a grocery, returned to complete four years of high school in one, and qualified in law. He became a circuit judge at thirty and served as a Marine intelligence officer in the Pacific, exaggerating his war record afterwards into the nickname Tail-Gunner Joe. He won a Senate seat in 1946 and was undistinguished until February 1950, when he told a Republican women's club in Wheeling, West Virginia that he held a list of 205 communists working in the State Department. The number changed repeatedly and no list was ever produced, but the claim arrived weeks after the Soviet atomic test, the fall of China and the Hiss conviction, and it caught. For four years he chaired hearings that destroyed careers on accusation and association. His counsel Roy Cohn ran much of it. Government employees, academics, writers and broadcasters were dismissed or blacklisted; the number of actual spies he identified was zero. He overreached in 1954 by attacking the army. The hearings were televised for thirty-six days, and the army's counsel Joseph Welch asked him whether he had no sense of decency. Edward R. Murrow had already turned McCarthy's own footage against him on See It Now. The Senate censured him that December by 67 votes to 22. He was ignored thereafter, drank heavily, and died of hepatitis in 1957 at forty-eight.

• Lived: 1908 CE – 1957 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: statesman