MCH-Dr. Tim Crain Presents: The Politics of Fear: Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of 1950-54

Session six: Demagogue and Downfall

Senator McCarthy’s communist subversion investigations in the US Government continued into the Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower detested his fellow Republican Joe McCarthy and wanted to destroy McCarthyism once and for all. The junior senator from Wisconsin was warned by Eisenhower’s vice-president Richard Nixon to tone down his investigations, but McCarthy refused and decided instead to begin an investigation into the US Army. The Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954 were watched on television by millions of Americans. The hearings ultimately exposed and destroyed the demagogue McCarthy, leading to his censure in the US Senate by the conclusion of the year. McCarthy’s Red Scare came to an end, and the Wisconsin senator would die from alcoholism just two years later at the age of 48. The movement represented a fundamental abuse of the rights of countless American citizens.