Sound Smart: Joseph McCarthy | History — Transcript

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1. 0:00Hi, this is Yur Williams. I'm a
2. 0:02historian and here's what you need to
3. 0:04know in order to sound smart about
4. 0:06Joseph McCarthy. During the 1940s and
5. 0:091950s, many Americans worried about the
6. 0:12prospects of communism rearing its head
7. 0:15within the United States. Republican
8. 0:17Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin
9. 0:20was one of the key political figures to
10. 0:22capitalize on these fears. In 1950, he
11. 0:26gave a salacious speech in Wheeling,
12. 0:28West Virginia, in which he claimed to
13. 0:30have evidence of 250 communists active
14. 0:34in the United States Department of
15. 0:35State. Despite the lack of evidence
16. 0:37corroborating McCarthy's claims, he
17. 0:40nevertheless continued to captivate the
18. 0:43American public for the next 5 years.
19. 0:45During this period, McCarthy hurled
20. 0:48allegations that well-known authors,
21. 0:52activists, and government officials were
22. 0:54actually traitors and communist
23. 0:56sympathizers. This was known as red
24. 0:58baiting and often consisted of McCarthy
25. 1:01hurling allegations of suspected
26. 1:04communist involvement and forcing people
27. 1:07to respond and to defend their innocence
28. 1:09even though they had not been proven
29. 1:11guilty. It's not until McCarthy turned
30. 1:13his attention to the United States Army
31. 1:15in 1954 that his reign of terror came to
32. 1:19an end and he was censured by the United
33. 1:21States Senate. The American people were
34. 1:23treated to the full terror of
35. 1:25McCarthyism after the Army hearings were
36. 1:28televised. In an infamous exchange
37. 1:30during those televised hearings in which
38. 1:32McCarthy attacked a young army officer,
39. 1:35the Army's chief counsel thundered at
40. 1:37the senator, "Have you no sense of
41. 1:39decency, sir?" which encapsulated the
42. 1:42turn against McCarthy in this period. By
43. 1:44the time the televised army hearings
44. 1:46ended, McCarthy lost much of his popular
45. 1:49support. He died in 1957, just a short
46. 1:52time later, at the age of 48.
47. 1:58Young people in large numbers came out
48. 2:01and joined what became known as the Red
49. 2:03Guards. These largely terroristic
50. 2:05organizations were used to publicly
51. 2:08humiliate, assault, and in some cases
52. 2:10even murder political enemies of Mao and
53. 2:13the Communist Party.