Joseph Mccarthy, Bio, Speech, Quotes, Mccarthyism, Net Worth, Death

Joseph Mccarthy Biography

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957.

Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion.

He is known for alleging that numerous Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry, and elsewhere. Ultimately, the smear tactics that he used led him to be censured by the U.S. Senate.

The term “McCarthyism”, coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy’s practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.

Joseph Mccarthy Early Life

McCarthy was born in 1908 on a farm in the town of Grand Chute in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, the fifth of seven children. His mother, Bridget (Tierney), was from County Tipperary, Ireland. His father, Timothy McCarthy, was born in the United States, the son of an Irish father and a German mother.

McCarthy dropped out of junior high school at age 14 to help his parents manage their farm. He entered Little Wolf High School, in Manawa, Wisconsin, when he was 20 and graduated in one year. He attended Marquette University from 1930 to 1935.

McCarthy worked his way through college, studying first electrical engineering for two years, then a law, and receiving an LL.B.degree in 1935 from Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee.

Joseph Mccarthy Career

Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957.

Joseph Mccarthy Judicial career

McCarthy was admitted to the bar in 1935. While working at a law firm in Shawano, Wisconsin, he launched an unsuccessful campaign for district attorney as a Democrat in 1936. During his years as an attorney, McCarthy made money on the side by gambling.

In 1939, McCarthy had better success when he ran for the nonpartisan elected post of 10th District circuit judge. McCarthy became the youngest circuit judge in the state’s history by defeating incumbent Edgar V. Werner, who had been a judge for 24 years.

 In the campaign, McCarthy exaggerated Werner’s age of 66, claiming that he was 73, and so allegedly too old and infirm to handle the duties of his office. Writing of Werner in Reds: McCarthyism In Twentieth-Century America, Ted Morgan wrote: “Pompous and condescending, he (Werner) was disliked by lawyers.

He had been reversed often by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and he was so inefficient that he had piled up a huge backlog of cases.”McCarthy’s judicial career attracted some controversy because of the speed with which he dispatched many of his cases as he worked to clear the heavily backlogged docket he had inherited from Werner.

 Wisconsin had strict divorce laws, but when McCarthy heard divorce cases, he expedited them whenever possible, and he made the needs of children involved in contested divorces a priority. When it came to other cases argued before him, McCarthy compensated for his lack of experience as a jurist by demanding and relying heavily upon precise briefs from the contesting attorneys.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed a low percentage of the cases he heard, but he was also censured in 1941 for having lost evidence in a price-fixing case.

Joseph Mccarthy United States Marine Corps

In 1942, shortly after the U.S. entered World War II, McCarthy joined the United States Marine Corps, despite the fact that his judicial office exempted him from military service. His college education qualified him for a direct commission, and he entered the Marines as a first lieutenant.

He served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville for 30 months [August 1942 – February 1945] and held the rank of captain by the time he resigned his commission in April 1945.

He volunteered to fly twelve combat missions as a gunner-observer, acquiring (or perhaps giving himself) the nickname “Tail-Gunner Joe”.McCarthy remained in the Marine Corps Reserve after the war, attaining the rank of major

Joseph Mccarthy Senate

Senator McCarthy’s first three years in the Senate were unremarkable.McCarthy was a popular speaker, invited by many different organizations, covering a wide range of topics. His aides and many in the Washington social circle described him as charming and friendly, and he was a popular guest at cocktail parties.

He was far less well-liked among fellow senators, however, who found him quick-tempered and prone to impatience and even rage. Outside of a small circle of colleagues, he was soon an isolated figure in the Senate.

He was active in labor-management issues, with a reputation as a moderate Republican. He fought against the continuation of wartime price controls, especially on sugar. His advocacy in this area was associated by critics with a $20,000 personal loan McCarthy received from a Pepsi bottling executive, earning the Senator the derisive nickname “The Pepsi-Cola Kid”.

He supported the Taft–Hartley Act over Truman’s veto, angering labor unions in Wisconsin but solidifying his business base.

Joseph Mccarthy Speech

McCarthy experienced a meteoric rise in national profile on February 9, 1950, when he gave a Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. His words in the speech are a matter of some debate, as no audio recording was saved.

However, it is generally agreed that he produced a piece of paper that he claimed contained a list of known Communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is usually quoted to have said: “The State Department is infested with communists.

I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

There is some dispute about whether or not McCarthy actually gave the number of people on the list as being “205” or “57”. In a later telegram to President Truman, and when entering the speech into the Congressional Record, he used the number 57.

The origin of the number 205 can be traced: in later debates on the Senate floor, McCarthy referred to a 1946 letter that then-Secretary of State James Byrnes sent to Congressman Adolph J. Sabbath.

In that letter, Byrnes said State Department security investigations had resulted in “recommendation against permanent employment” for 284 persons, and that 79 of these had been removed from their jobs; this left 205 still on the State Department’s payroll.

In fact, by the time of McCarthy’s speech only about 65 of the employees mentioned in the Byrnes letter were still with the State Department, and all of these had undergone further security checks. At the time of McCarthy’s speech, communism was a significant concern in the United States.

This concern was exacerbated by the actions of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, the victory of the communists in the Chinese Civil War, the Soviets’ development of a nuclear weapon the year before, and by the contemporary controversy surrounding Alger Hiss and the confession of Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs.

With this background and due to the sensational nature of McCarthy’s charge against the State Department, the Wheeling speech soon attracted a flood of press interest in McCarthy’s claim.

Mccarthyism Definition

McCarthy presented a case-by-case analysis of his 81 “loyalty risks” employed at the State Department. It is widely accepted that most of McCarthy’s cases were selected from the so-called “Lee list”, a report that had been compiled three years earlier for the House Appropriations Committee.

Led by a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent named Robert E. Lee, the House investigators had reviewed security clearance documents on State Department employees and had determined that there were “incidents of inefficiencies” in the security reviews of 108 employees.

McCarthy hid the source of his list, stating that he had penetrated the “iron curtain” of State Department secrecy with the aid of “some good, loyal Americans in the State Department”.In reciting the information from the Lee list cases, McCarthy consistently exaggerated, representing the hearsay of witnesses as facts and converting phrases such as “inclined towards Communism” to “a Communist”.

Mccarthyism Definition

McCarthyism, the name was given to the period of time in American history that saw Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy produce a series of investigations and hearings during the 1950s in an effort to expose supposed communist infiltration of various areas of the U.S. government.

Currently, McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. It also means “the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.”

Joseph Mccarthy Fear of Communism

From 1950 onward, McCarthy continued to exploit the fear of Communism and to press his accusations that the government was failing to deal with Communism within its ranks. McCarthy also began investigations into the numerous homosexuals working in the foreign policy bureaucracy, who were considered prime candidates for blackmail by the Soviets.

These accusations received wide publicity, increased his approval rating, and gained him a powerful national following.McCarthy’s methods also brought on the disapproval and opposition of many. Barely a month after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, the term “McCarthyism” was coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block.

Block and others used the word as a synonym for demagoguery, baseless defamation, and mudslinging. Later, it would be embraced by McCarthy and some of his supporters. “McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled,” McCarthy said in a 1952 speech, and later that year, he published a book titled McCarthyism: The Fight For America.

McCarthy sought to discredit his critics and political opponents by accusing them of being Communists or communist sympathizers. In the 1950 Maryland Senate election, McCarthy campaigned for John Marshall Butler in his race against four-term incumbent Millard Tydings, with whom McCarthy had been in conflict during the Tydings Committee hearings.

In speeches supporting Butler, McCarthy accused Tydings of “protecting Communists” and “shielding traitors.” McCarthy’s staff was heavily involved in the campaign and collaborated in the production of a campaign tabloid that contained a composite photograph doctored to make it appear that Tydings was an intimate conversation with Communist leader Earl Russell Browder.

A Senate subcommittee later investigated this election and referred to it as “a despicable, back-street type of campaign,” as well as recommending that the use of defamatory literature in a campaign be made grounds for expulsion from the Senate.

The pamphlet was clearly labeled a composite. McCarthy said it was “wrong” to distribute it; though staffer Jean Kerr thought it was fine. After he lost the election by almost 40,000 votes, Tydings claimed foul play.

Joseph Mccarthy Truman

McCarthy and President Truman clashed often during the years both held office. McCarthy characterized Truman and the Democratic Party as soft on, or even in league with, Communists, and spoke of the Democrats’ “twenty years of treason”.

Truman, in turn, once referred to McCarthy as “the best asset the Kremlin has”, calling McCarthy’s actions an attempt to “sabotage the foreign policy of the United States” in a cold war and comparing it to shooting American soldiers in the back in a hot war.

It was the Truman Administration’s State Department that McCarthy accused of harboring 205 (or 57 or 81) “known Communists”. Truman’s Secretary of Defense, George Catlett Marshall, was the target of some of McCarthy’s most vitriolic rhetoric. Marshall had been Army Chief of Staff during World War II and was also Truman’s former Secretary of State.

Marshall was a highly respected general and statesman, remembered today as the architect of victory and peace, the latter based on the Marshall Plan for post-war reconstruction of Europe, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

McCarthy made a lengthy speech on Marshall, later published in 1951 as a book titled America’s Retreat From Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall. Marshall had been involved in American foreign policy with China, and McCarthy charged that Marshall was directly responsible for the loss of China to Communism.

In the speech McCarthy also implied that Marshall was guilty of treason; declared that “if Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country’s interest”; and most famously, accused him of being part of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man”.

During the Korean War, when President Truman dismissed General Douglas MacArthur, McCarthy charged that Truman and his advisors must have planned the dismissal during late-night sessions when “they’ve had time to get the President cheerful” on bourbon and Bénédictine. McCarthy declared, “The son of a bitch should be impeached.

Joseph Mccarthy And The Kennedy Family

McCarthy established a bond with the powerful Kennedy family, which had high visibility among Catholics. McCarthy became a close friend of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., himself a fervent anti-Communist, and was a frequent guest at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. He dated two of Kennedy’s daughters, Patricia and Eunice.

 It has been stated that McCarthy was godfather to Robert F. Kennedy’s first child, Kathleen Kennedy. This claim has been acknowledged by Robert’s wife and Kathleen’s mother Ethel, though Kathleen later claimed that she looked at her christening certificate and that her actual godfather was Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart professor Daniel Walsh.

Robert Kennedy was chosen by McCarthy as a counsel for his investigatory committee but resigned after six months due to disagreements with McCarthy and Committee Counsel Roy Marcus Cohn. Joseph Kennedy had a national network of contacts and became a vocal supporter, building McCarthy’s popularity among Catholics and making sizable contributions to McCarthy’s campaigns.

 The Kennedy patriarch hoped that one of his sons would be president. Mindful of the anti-Catholic prejudice Al Smith faced during his 1928 campaign for that office, Joseph Kennedy supported McCarthy as a national Catholic politician who might pave the way for a younger Kennedy’s presidential candidacy.

Unlike many Democrats, John F. Kennedy, who served in the Senate with McCarthy from 1953 until the latter’s death in 1957, never attacked McCarthy. McCarthy had refused to campaign for Kennedy’s 1952 opponent, Republican incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., due to his friendship with the Kennedys.

When a speaker at a February 1952 final club dinner stated that he was glad McCarthy had not attended Harvard College, an angry Kennedy jumped up, denounced the speaker, and left the event. Asked by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. why he avoided criticism of McCarthy, Kennedy said, “Hell, half my voters in Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero.

Army Mccarthy Hearings

Early in 1954, the U.S. Army accused McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, of improperly pressuring the army to give favorable treatment to G. David Schine, a former aide to McCarthy and a friend of Cohn’s, who was then serving in the army as a private.

McCarthy claimed that the accusation was made in bad faith, in retaliation for his questioning of Zwicker the previous year. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, usually chaired by McCarthy himself, was given the task of adjudicating these conflicting charges.

Republican Senator Karl Mundt was appointed to chair the committee, and the Army–McCarthy hearings convened on April 22, 1954. The army consulted with an attorney familiar with McCarthy to determine the best approach to attacking him.

Based on his recommendation, it decided not to pursue McCarthy on the issue of communists in government: “The attorney feels it is almost impossible to counter McCarthy effectively on the issue of kicking Communists out of Government, because he generally has some basis, no matter how slight, for his claim of Communist connection.”

The hearings lasted for 36 days and were broadcast on live television by ABC and DuMont, with an estimated 20 million viewers. After hearing 32 witnesses and two million words of testimony, the committee concluded that McCarthy himself had not exercised any improper influence on Schine’s behalf, but that Cohn had engaged in “unduly persistent or aggressive efforts”.

The committee also concluded that Army Secretary Robert Stevens and Army Counsel John Adams “made efforts to terminate or influence the investigation and hearings at Fort Monmouth”, and that Adams “made vigorous and diligent efforts” to block subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board “by means of personal appeal to certain members of the [McCarthy] committee”.

Of far greater importance to McCarthy than the committee’s inconclusive final report was the negative effect that the extensive exposure had on his popularity. Many in the audience saw him as bullying, reckless, and dishonest, and the daily newspaper summaries of the hearings were also frequently unfavorable.

Late in the hearings, Senator Stuart Symington made an angry and prophetic remark to McCarthy, upon being told by McCarthy that “You’re not fooling anyone”: “Senator, the American people have had a look at you now for six weeks; you’re not fooling anyone, either.”

In Gallup polls of January 1954, 50% of those polled had a positive opinion of McCarthy. In June, that number had fallen to 34%. In the same polls, those with a negative opinion of McCarthy increased from 29% to 45%.

An increasing number of Republicans and conservatives were coming to see McCarthy as a liability to the party and to anti-communism. Congressman George H. Bender noted, “There is a growing impatience with the Republican Party.

McCarthyism has become a synonym for witch-hunting, Star Chamber methods, and the denial of … civil liberties.”Frederick Woltman, a reporter with a long-standing reputation as a staunch anti-communist, wrote a five-part series of articles criticizing McCarthy in the New York World-Telegram.

He stated that McCarthy “has become a major liability to the cause of anti-communism”, and accused him of “wild twisting of facts and near facts [that] repels authorities in the field”.

Joseph Mccarthy President Eisenhower

After his censure, McCarthy continued senatorial duties for another two and a half years, but his career as a major public figure had been unmistakably ruined. His colleagues in the senate avoided him; his speeches on the Senate floor were delivered to a near-empty chamber or were received with conspicuous displays of inattention.

The press that had once recorded his every public statement now ignored him and outside speaking engagements dwindled almost to nothing. President Eisenhower finally freed of McCarthy’s political intimidation, quipped to his Cabinet that McCarthyism was now “McCarthywasm”.

Still, McCarthy continued to rail against Communism. He warned against attendance at summit conferences with “the Reds”, saying that “you cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers … without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder.”

He declared that “coexistence with Communists is neither possible nor honorable nor desirable. Our long-term objective must be the eradication of Communism from the face of the earth.” In one of his final acts in the Senate.

McCarthy opposed President Eisenhower’s nomination to the Supreme Court of William J. Brennan, after reading a speech Brennan had given shortly beforehand in which he characterized McCarthy’s anti-Communist investigations as “witch hunts”. McCarthy’s opposition failed to gain any traction, however, and he was the only senator to vote against Brennan’s confirmation

Joseph Mccarthy Family

Joseph’s wife was the daughter of William P. Kerr and Elizabeth Fraser Kerr, both natives of Scotland. They married in 1953. They had one daughter, Tierney Elizabeth.

Mrs. Minetti attended George Washington University and later graduated from Northwestern University. She worked as a writer and researcher for former Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Later, she taught art at the Corcoran Museum in Washington and the Montgomery College School of Art.

Joseph Mccarthy Net Worth

The  Senator’s is ranked in the list of most popular celebrities. Also, ranked on the list with those people who were born on November 14. Have to Position Among the list of Most popular Politician. his net w0rth is under review.

Joseph Mccarthy Death

It was reported that McCarthy suffered from cirrhosis of the liver and was frequently hospitalized for alcoholism. Numerous eyewitnesses, including Senate aide George Reedy and journalist Tom Wicker, reported finding him alarmingly drunk in the Senate. Journalist  (1959) wrote:

McCarthy died in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957, at the age of 48. His death certificate listed the cause of death as “Hepatitis, acute, cause unknown”; doctors had not previously reported him to be in critical condition. It was hinted in the press that he died of alcoholism, an estimation that is now accepted by modern biographers.

Joseph Mccarthy Funeral

He was given a state funeral attended by 70 senators, and a Solemn Pontifical Requiem Mass was celebrated before more than 100 priests and 2,000 others at Washington’s St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Thousands of people viewed the body in Washington.

He was buried in St. Mary’s Parish Cemetery, Appleton, Wisconsin, where more than 17,000 filed through St. Mary’s Church to pay their last respects. Three senators—George W. Malone, William E. Jenner, and Herman Welker—had flown from Washington to Appleton on the plane carrying McCarthy’s casket.

Robert F. Kennedy quietly attended the funeral in Wisconsin. McCarthy was survived by his wife, Jean, and their adopted daughter, Tierney. In the summer of 1957, a special election was held to fill McCarthy’s seat.

In the primaries, voters in both parties turned away from McCarthy’s legacy. The Republican primary was won by Walter J. Kohler Jr., who called for a clean break from McCarthy’s approach; he defeated former Congressman Glenn Robert Davis, who charged that Eisenhower was soft on Communism.

The Democratic candidate, William Proxmire, called the late McCarthy “a disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America”. On August 27, Proxmire won the election, serving in the seat for 32 years.

Joseph Mccarthy Legacy

McCarthy remains a controversial figure. Some scholars assert that new evidence—in the form of Venona-decrypted Soviet messages, Soviet espionage data now opened to the West, and newly released transcripts of closed hearings before McCarthy’s subcommittee has partially vindicated McCarthy by showing that many of his identifications of Communists were correct.

The scale of Soviet espionage activity in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s was larger than many scholars suspected. After reviewing evidence from Venona and other sources, historian John Earl Haynes concluded that, of 159 people identified on lists used or referenced by McCarthy, evidence was substantial that nine had aided Soviet espionage efforts.

He suggested that a majority of those on the lists could legitimately have been considered security risks, but that a substantial minority could not. Many other scholars, including some generally regarded as conservative, have opposed these view

UAC and SACB

McCarthy’s hearings are often incorrectly conflated with the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). HUAC is best known for the investigation of Alger Hiss and for its investigation of the Hollywood film industry, which led to the blacklisting of hundreds of actors, writers, and directors.

HUAC was a House committee, and as such had no formal connection with McCarthy, who served in the Senate, although the existence of the House Un-American Activities Committee thrived in part as a result of McCarthy’s activities. HUAC was active for 37 years (1938–1975).

Similarly, the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) was a five-member committee established by the McCarran Internal Security Act in 1950, which had a mandate, similar to HUAC and inspired by McCarthy, to locate and investigate so-called “subversives”, or those sympathetic to the Communists.

They were accused of promoting the establishment of a “totalitarian dictatorship” in the United States. President Truman vetoed the act, sending Congress a lengthy veto message in which he criticized specific provisions as “the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798.”

called it a “mockery of the Bill of Rights” and a “long step toward totalitarianism”; his veto was overridden. SACB was active for 18 years (1950–1968), but the Supreme Court did not rule all sections of the law were unconstitutional until 1993.