McCarthy Ignites Red Scare: Fear Sweeps Washington

Senator Joseph McCarthy waved a piece of paper before an audience in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, claiming it contained the names of 205 known Communists working in the State Department. The exact number changed in subsequent tellings, and McCarthy never produced the list. It did not matter. The accusation was enough to launch a four-year reign of political terror. McCarthy's Senate investigations destroyed careers across government, entertainment, and academia. Witnesses who invoked the Fifth Amendment were assumed guilty. Those who cooperated were pressured to name others, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of denunciation. Hollywood studios maintained blacklists of suspected sympathizers who could not find work for years. McCarthy's downfall came during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, when attorney Joseph Welch's rebuke, 'Have you no sense of decency?' crystallized public disgust. The Senate censured McCarthy, who drank himself to death three years later at age forty-eight.