Waving a piece of paper in the air, he declared that he had a list of 205 known members of the Communist Party who were “working and shaping policy” in the State Department. In February 1950, appearing at the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy gave a speech that propelled him into the national spotlight. At the time, McCarthy was a first-term senator from Wisconsin who had won election in 1946 after a campaign in which he criticized his opponent’s failure to enlist during World War II while emphasizing his own wartime heroics. (President Truman vetoed the Act-he said it “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights”-but a Congressional majority overrode his veto.) Joseph McCarthy and the Rise of McCarthyismĪll of these factors combined to create an atmosphere of fear and dread, which proved a ripe environment for the rise of a staunch anticommunist like Joseph McCarthy. In 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required that all “subversives” in the United States submit to government supervision. HUAC’s targets included left-wingers in Hollywood and liberals in the State Department. On March 9, 1954, millions of Americans watched as the national news program 'See It Now' attacked McCarthy and his methods.Īt the same time, the Republican-led House Un-American Activities Committee (known as HUAC) began a determined campaign to extirpate communist subversion at home. Murrow’s exposés of McCarthyism played an important role in the senator’s downfall.

In 1950, North Korea’s Soviet-backed army invaded its pro-Western neighbors to the South in response, the United States entered the conflict on the side of South Korea.ĭid you know? Along with the Army-McCarthy hearings, journalist Edward R. Later that year, Communist forces declared victory in the Chinese Civil War and established the People’s Republic of China.

In August 1949, for instance, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb.

In the years after World War II ended, events at home and abroad seemed to many Americans to prove that the “Red menace” was real.

Why cold war was called cold