Fear arrived in America before Joseph McCarthy did. By the time the junior senator from Wisconsin stood up in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950, and claimed to hold a list of communist subversives, Americans had already spent five years learning to be afraid. The Soviet Union had the atomic bomb. China had fallen to Mao. Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were awaiting trial. And soldiers were dying in Korea against an army no one had expected.
Patricia Anne Dunleavy traces the full arc of the American inquisition across twenty-four chapters — from the VENONA intercepts that documented real Soviet espionage, through HUAC's Hollywood investigations, the Rosenberg execution in 1953, McCarthy's claim of 205 communists in the State Department, Dalton Trumbo writing Oscar-winning screenplays under a false name, J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance stripped from the man who built the atomic bomb, the Lavender Scare that purged an estimated 5,000-10,000 gay federal employees alongside suspected communists, and finally Joseph Welch's live television question — "Have you no sense of decency?" — that ended McCarthy's career in a single afternoon.
Inside this McCarthyism history:
- The real Soviet threat — VENONA's decoded cables, the genuine atomic spies, and the critical distinction between espionage and political opinion that McCarthyism deliberately destroyed (Chapter 1)
- HUAC and the Hollywood Ten — the public hearing as theater, Dalton Trumbo's blacklisted Oscar win under the name "Robert Rich," and the Waldorf Statement by which studio heads voluntarily surrendered their employees (Chapters 2-3)
- The Alger Hiss case — the pumpkin papers, Richard Nixon's prosecution that made his career, and VENONA evidence that shifted the historical consensus toward guilt (Chapter 4)
- McCarthy's Wheeling speech — how a first-term senator built national power from a list that did not exist, and why the Senate's procedural rules could not stop him (Chapter 5)
- The Lavender Scare — the parallel gay purge within the Red Scare, Roy Cohn's irony, and Frank Kameny's refusal to accept dismissal quietly (Chapter 16)
- Edward R. Murrow and the Army-McCarthy hearings — the television broadcast that changed public opinion, and the moment McCarthy destroyed himself on live TV (Chapters 10-11)
- The permanent security state — how the Cold War apparatus survived McCarthy's censure, and McCarthyism's lessons about demagoguery and democratic resilience (Chapters 21-24)
McCarthyism was not merely a senator's excess. It was a democracy's near-failure — a systematic destruction of careers, civil liberties, and political trust that the country recovered from only slowly, and incompletely. Understanding how it happened, and what ended it, is the essential preparation for recognizing it the next time.
For readers of David Oshinsky's A CONSPIRACY SO IMMENSE and Ellen Schrecker's MANY ARE THE CRIMES.