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Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
In a Lincoln’s Birthday address to the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, delivered on this day in 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, (R-Wis.) on Feb. 9, 1950, declared:
“Today, we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down.”
McCarthy had come to the Senate three years earlier after unseating Robert La Follette, Jr., a 22-year incumbent who had devoted more of his energy to passage of a landmark 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act than to that year’s Republican senatorial primary in Wisconsin.
McCarthy’s initial years in the Senate were marked by an impatient and flagrant disregard of the body’s rules, customs and procedures. One observer at the time noted the ease with which he rearranged the truth to serve his purposes. “Once he got going, logic and decorum gave way to threats, personal attacks and multiple distortions,” he wrote.
In his Wheeling speech, McCarthy asserted — without offering any proof to back up his sensational charges — that homegrown traitors were causing America to lose the Cold War to the Soviet Union and its communist bloc satraps.
“While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 [of them],” he said falsely.
McCarthy would remain the Senate’s most controversial member until that body censured him four years later. It did so after McCarthy had crossed a political red line by attacking Dwight Eisenhower, the popular Republican president and a top general in World War II.
As Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) put it: “There was never quite anyone like McCarthy in the Senate, before or after; nor has this chamber ever gone through a more painful period.”
Following his death in 1957, “McCarthyism” became a permanently charged word in the American political lexicon.
SOURCE: WWW.SENATE.GOV; “THE POLITICS OF FEAR: JOSEPH MCCARTHY AND THE SENATE,” BY ROBERT GRIFFITH (1970)