McCarthyism
From RationalWiki
| “ | Were the Junior Senator from Wisconsin in the pay of the Communists he could not have done a better job for them.[1] | ” |
| —Sen. Ralph Flanders | ||
McCarthyism involves accusing innocent people of disloyalty for political gain. Named after Joseph McCarthy, possibly the most famous Senator from Wisconsin. Hey, at least we had the LaFollettes.
McCarthy's legacy was being the embodiment of the 1950s rebirth of the Red Scare, a period in which lives were routinely ruined due to accusations that the people in question were Communists. Apparently the First Amendment right to freedom of association was abrogated at some point in the late 1940s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and McCarthy ran with it in the Senate as an attempt at grandstanding, which began after he claimed that a honeydew note from his wife (or, at least, that's what legend says it was) was a list of over 200 Communist infiltrators in the State Department (the actual number of claimed infiltrators changed from interview to interview after that bit of political theatre).
Accusations flew fast and furious, especially in Hollywood, where a long list of actors, directors, producers, and production help had their careers more or less ruined within the United States due to backstabbing and informing. McCarthy was ultimately censured by the Senate after Edward R. Murrow delivered a brutal and well-deserved hatchet job on the CBS News show See It Now, and US Army attorney Joseph Welch told McCarthy off in the middle of a Senate hearing with the now-famous line "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
The McCarthy hearings spawned several major works of pop culture, including Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront, a Marlon Brando vehicle generally believed to be Kazan's defense for cooperating with McCarthy (Kazan's collaboration made him many enemies in Hollywood, and Kazan never owned up), and The Crucible, Arthur Miller's play using a dramatization of the Salem witch trials as a vehicle to criticize McCarthyism.
A few people still believe that McCarthy's work was a just and necessary defense of the national security of the United States. These people are generally considered wrong.
