Joseph McCarthy: “Enemies from Within” Speech (1950)
Explanation and Analysis of the Document
Senator McCarthy made his famous anti-Communist speech on February 9, 1950, at a celebration of the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. His first paragraph marks the occasion by expressing a wish that this could be a peaceful, disarmed world of the kind Lincoln had desired. McCarthy is implying that conditions are not what could be hoped for.
The second short paragraph baldly describes a “cold war” world and an arms race—not what Americans expected to experience five years after victory in World War II. The third paragraph quickly picks up momentum by alluding not only to the division of Europe into the Soviet-dominated East and the pro-American West but also to tensions over Communist China and Formosa (Taiwan), the island on which Chiang Kai-shek established a government after the Communists defeated him. Moreover, Indochina, once dominated by the French, is now the target of Communist infiltration.
It is not too late, however, to...
