McCarthyism

From RationalWiki

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 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 freedom of thought was abrogated at some point in the late 1940s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and McCarthy ran with it in the Senate). 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 had created all this fuss by claiming 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). 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 had made him many enemies in Hollywood, and Kazan never owned up), and The Crucible, Arthur Miller's protest play by way of a dramatization of the Salem Witch Trials.

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.