Joseph McCarthy: “Enemies from Within” Speech

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 establish peace, McCarthy suggests, if the United States deals openly with a new kind of war—a war between the two ideologies represented by the United States and the Soviet Union. McCarthy implies that the reality of this struggle has not been named for what it actually is: a moral battle between a Christian culture and an atheistic Communist state. In other words, the new struggle is not merely between different political systems but is really a battle over the very way the world should be organized, with the Communist imposition of government ownership of resources and the one-party state representing, in McCarthy's words, a “momentous” turn in history.

Joseph Stalin built on Vladimir Lenin's legacy, McCarthy notes in paragraph 6, but Communist ideology in itself is not the problem. Coexistence of different ideologies would be possible if Lenin and Stalin had not been intent on spreading their “religion of immoralism” to half the world already. If Communism should triumph—and McCarthy fears that it might—it would “wound and damage mankind” more deeply than any other political system. Noting the continuity of ideas from Karl Marx to Lenin to Stalin, McCarthy concludes that Communists do not believe they can prevail without destroying Christian civilization.

McCarthy's two-sentence statement in paragraph 10 combines a biblical, apocalyptic, prophetic tone with a down-to-earth American way of describing a crisis, a defining moment in history: “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.” The metaphor of a poker game, in which there is a showdown, so to speak, a revealing of the cards that have been dealt and the determination of a winner, accentuates the urgency of McCarthy's message. In six years, McCarthy reports, Communism has spread while “our side” has shrunk, changing the odds from 9 to 1 in our favor to “8 to 5 against us.” What is worse, our side has collaborated in its own defeat: “As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, ‘When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.'”

McCarthy then sounds a theme that would be repeated often in his hearings and by other anti-Communists supporting him: America has been betrayed by its best-educated and most privileged citizens. McCarthy's audience would have in mind Alger Hiss, an Ivy League–educated State Department official who had been convicted of perjury in a trial relating to conspiracy to spy against the U.S. government for the Soviet Union. In a copy of the speech delivered to the press before he spoke, McCarthy claimed to have a list of 205 State Department employees known to be Communist Party members. Some days later he reduced his claim to a list of fifty-seven names. The number is not important except insofar as McCarthy was claiming he had evidence (never released to the public) that the secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had done nothing to rectify the problem. In effect, McCarthy was accusing the secretary of state of colluding with Communists by allowing them to remain in positions that could shape U.S. foreign policy according to the dictates of the Soviet Union. Indeed, McCarthy directly links Acheson to Communists by noting that Acheson has “proclaimed his loyalty to a man [Alger Hiss] guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes—being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust—high treason.”

McCarthy's concluding paragraph casts his anti-Communist program in broader terms. He calls not only for expelling Communists from government positions but also, in a larger sense, working for “a new birth of honesty and decency in government.” This ending fits well with his notion that the anti-Communist movement is a moral crusade, a heroic calling to save America from its disloyal and highly privileged upper class. Joe McCarthy, “Tailgunner Joe,” is making himself the spokesman for the democratic majority whose values have been subverted by a traitorous elite.