|
 The
Army-McCarthy hearings
were the first nationally televised congressional inquiry.
They would soon be followed by other televised hearings, and
demonstrated how congressional representatives could use--and
misuse--the exposure offered by the new broadcast medium and
the forum provided by Congress's investigatory authority.
In February
1950, Joseph
McCarthy, a first-term Republican senator from Wisconsin,
gained national prominence when, in a speech in Wheeling,
West Virginia, he held up a piece of paper that he claimed
was a list of 205 known communists then employed in the State
Department. McCarthy never produced documentation for a single
one of his charges, but for the next four years he exploited
an issue that worried many as the Cold War provoked fear of
nuclear confrontation.
Broadcast
gavel-to-gavel on the ABC and DuMont networks from April 22
to June 17, 1954, the hearings held by the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations were convened to investigate
a series of charges leveled at the U.S. Army by Senator McCarthy,
as well as the Army's claims that McCarthy and his aides were
seeking special privileges for G. David Schine, a consultant
formerly on McCarthy's staff who was drafted into the Army
in November 1953. McCarthy responded by charging that the
Army was holding Schine "hostage" to deter his committee
from exposing communists within the military.
The hearings
also were preceded by the famous March 9, 1954 CBS telecast
in which Edward R. Murrow confronted McCarthy on his tactics.
McCarthy's bullying of witnesses during the hearings and his
lack of evidence to support his extreme charges further eroded
his political support. On December 2, 1954, McCarthy was censured
by his Senate colleagues. McCarthy's name lives on, however,
with the American Heritage Dictionary defining "McCarthyism"
as
"1. The political practice of publicizing accusations
of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence,
and 2. The use of methods of investigation and accusation
regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition."
Senator
McCarthy was the most prominent, but certainly not the only,
political figure to focus during the period on the fear of
communist infiltration of American government and society.
Other significant events included the conviction and execution
of Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg for treason; the hearings of the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), during which
Congressman Richard Nixon first gained national attention,
into the accusations
by Whittaker Chambers against former State Department official
Alger Hiss of being a member of the communist party; other
HUAC hearings utilizing information from FBI investigations
into the influence of communists in the entertainment industry
leading to the "blacklist"
of actors, writers and others; and various other espionage
investigations conducted by the FBI
under its director, J.
Edgar Hoover. For additional links, see The
Literature & Culture of the American 1950s, University
of Pennsylvania
Resources
The
Army-McCarthy Hearings >>The
Museum of Broadcast Communications
Senator
Joe McCarthy: A Multimedia Celebration >>Webcorp.com
Senator
Joe McCarthy
--a brief excerpt from Richard H. Rovere's Senator Joe McCarthy
>>
University of Pennsylvania
Summary
of Case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: FBI Files
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