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Article: McCarthyism
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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McCARTHYISM
McCARTHYISM
has been misnamed. Often identified with the bizarre antics of the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, the anticommunist political repression to which he gave a name had been in operation for years before he appeared at a Republican banquet in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950. And it was to continue for several years after he self-destructed before the nation's television viewers at the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954. There was nothing unique about McCarthy's charges of subversion in high places. Ever since the 1930s, conservative politicians and journalists had been attacking the New Deal administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry ...