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Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 - May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread communist subversion. He is known for alleging that numerous communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry, and elsewhere. Ultimately, the smear tactics that he used led him to be censured by the U.S. Senate. The term " McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.

Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, McCarthy commissioned into the Marine Corps in 1942, where he served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron. Following the end of World War II, he attained the rank of major. He volunteered to fly twelve combat missions as a gunner-observer, acquiring the nickname "Tail-Gunner Joe". Some of his claims of heroism were later shown to be exaggerated or falsified, leading many of his critics to use "Tail-Gunner Joe" as a term of mockery.

McCarthy successfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 1946, defeating Robert M. La Follette Jr. After three largely undistinguished years in the Senate, McCarthy rose suddenly to national fame in February 1950, when he asserted in a speech that he had a list of "members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" who were employed in the State Department. In succeeding years after his 1950 speech, McCarthy made additional accusations of Communist infiltration into the State Department, the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voice of America, and the U.S. Army. He also used various charges of communism, communist sympathies, disloyalty, or sex crimes to attack a number of politicians and other individuals inside and outside of government. This included a concurrent " Lavender Scare" against suspected homosexuals; as homosexuality was prohibited by law at the time, it was also perceived to increase a person's risk for blackmail. Former U.S. Senator Alan K. Simpson has written: "The so-called 'Red Scare' has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element ... and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals".

With the highly publicized Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year, McCarthy's support and popularity faded. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure Senator McCarthy by a vote of 67-22, making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion. He continued to speak against communism and socialism until his death at the age of 48 at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 2, 1957. His death certificate listed the cause of death as " Hepatitis, acute, cause unknown". Doctors had not previously reported him to be in critical condition. Some biographers say this was caused or exacerbated by alcoholism.

McCarthy was born in 1908 on a farm in the town of Grand Chute in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, the fifth of seven children. His mother, Bridget (Tierney), was from County Tipperary, Ireland. His father, Timothy McCarthy, was born in the United States, the son of an Irish father and a German mother. McCarthy dropped out of junior high school at age 14 to help his parents manage their farm. He entered Little Wolf High School, in Manawa, Wisconsin, when he was 20 and graduated in one year.

In 1939, McCarthy had better success when he ran for the nonpartisan elected post of 10th District circuit judge. McCarthy became the youngest circuit judge in the state's history by defeating incumbent Edgar V. Werner, who had been a judge for 24 years. In the campaign, McCarthy exaggerated Werner's age of 66, claiming that he was 73, and so allegedly too old and infirm to handle the duties of his office. Writing of Werner in Reds: McCarthyism In Twentieth-Century America, Ted Morgan wrote: "Pompous and condescending, he (Werner) was disliked by lawyers. His judgements had often been reversed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and he was so inefficient that he had piled up a huge backlog of cases."

McCarthy's judicial career attracted some controversy because of the speed with which he dispatched many of his cases as he worked to clear the heavily backlogged docket he had inherited from Werner. Wisconsin had strict divorce laws, but when McCarthy heard divorce cases, he expedited them whenever possible, and he made the needs of children involved in contested divorces a priority. When it came to other cases argued before him, McCarthy compensated for his lack of experience as a jurist by demanding and relying heavily upon precise briefs from the contesting attorneys. The Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed a low percentage of the cases he heard, but he was also censured in 1941 for having lost evidence in a price fixing case.

In 1942, shortly after the U.S. entered World War II, McCarthy joined the United States Marine Corps, despite the fact that his judicial office exempted him from military service. His college education qualified him for a direct commission, and he entered the Marines as a first lieutenant.

According to Morgan, writing in Reds, McCarthy's friend and campaign manager, attorney and judge Urban P. Van Susteren, had applied for active duty in the U.S. Army Air Forces in early 1942, and advised McCarthy: "Be a hero-join the Marines." When McCarthy seemed hesitant, Van Susteren asked, "You got shit in your blood?"

He served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville for 30 months (August 1942 - February 1945), and held the rank of captain by the time he resigned his commission in April 1945. He volunteered to fly twelve combat missions as a gunner-observer, acquiring (or perhaps giving himself) the nickname "Tail-Gunner Joe." McCarthy remained in the Marine Corps Reserve after the war, attaining the rank of major.

He later falsely claimed participation in 32 aerial missions in order to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross and multiple awards of the Air Medal, which the Marine Corps chain of command decided to approve in 1952 because of his political influence. McCarthy also publicized a letter of commendation which he claimed had been signed by his commanding officer and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, then Chief of Naval Operations. However, his commander revealed that McCarthy had written this letter himself, probably while preparing award citations and commendation letters as an additional duty, and that he had signed his commander's name, after which Nimitz signed it during the process of just signing numerous other such letters. A "war wound"-a badly broken leg-that McCarthy made the subject of varying stories involving airplane crashes or anti-aircraft fire had in fact happened aboard ship during a raucous celebration for sailors crossing the equator for the first time. Because of McCarthy's various lies about his military heroism, his "Tail-Gunner Joe" nickname was sarcastically used as a term of mockery by his critics.

McCarthy campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination in Wisconsin while still on active duty in 1944 but was defeated by Alexander Wiley, the incumbent. After he left the Marines in April 1945, five months before the end of the Pacific war in September 1945, McCarthy was reelected unopposed to his circuit court position. He then began a much more systematic campaign for the 1946 Republican Senate primary nomination, with support from Thomas Coleman, the Republican Party's political boss in Wisconsin. In this race, he was challenging three-term senator Robert M. La Follette Jr., founder of the Wisconsin Progressive Party and son of the celebrated Wisconsin governor and senator Robert M. La Follette Sr.

In his campaign, McCarthy attacked La Follette for not enlisting during the war, although La Follette had been 46 when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He also claimed La Follette had made huge profits from his investments while he, McCarthy, had been away fighting for his country. In fact, McCarthy had invested in the stock market himself during the war, netting a profit of $42,000 in 1943 (over $604,000 in 2017 dollars). Where McCarthy got the money to invest in the first place remains a mystery. La Follette's investments consisted of partial interest in a radio station, which earned him a profit of $47,000 over two years.

According to Jack Anderson and Ronald W. May, McCarthy's campaign funds, much of them from out of state, were ten times more than La Follette's and McCarthy's vote benefited from a Communist Party vendetta against La Follette. The suggestion that La Follette had been guilty of war profiteering was deeply damaging, and McCarthy won the primary nomination 207,935 votes to 202,557. It was during this campaign that McCarthy started publicizing his war-time nickname "Tail-Gunner Joe", using the slogan, "Congress needs a tail-gunner". Journalist Arnold Beichman later stated that McCarthy "was elected to his first term in the Senate with support from the Communist-controlled United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, CIO", which preferred McCarthy to the anti-communist Robert M. La Follette. In the general election against Democratic opponent Howard J. McMurray, McCarthy won 61.2% to Democrat McMurray's 37.3%, and thus joined Senator Wiley, whom he had challenged unsuccessfully two years earlier, in the Senate.

Senator McCarthy's first three years in the Senate were unremarkable. McCarthy was a popular speaker, invited by many different organizations, covering a wide range of topics. His aides and many in the Washington social circle described him as charming and friendly, and he was a popular guest at cocktail parties. He was far less well liked among fellow senators, however, who found him quick-tempered and prone to impatience and even rage. Outside of a small circle of colleagues, he was soon an isolated figure in the Senate.

He was active in labor-management issues, with a reputation as a moderate Republican. He fought against continuation of wartime price controls, especially on sugar. His advocacy in this area was associated by critics with a $20,000 personal loan McCarthy received from a Pepsi bottling executive, earning the Senator the derisive nickname "The Pepsi-Cola Kid". He supported the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman's veto, angering labor unions in Wisconsin but solidifying his business base.

In an incident for which he would be widely criticized, McCarthy lobbied for the commutation of death sentences given to a group of Waffen-SS soldiers convicted of war crimes for carrying out the 1944 Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war. McCarthy was critical of the convictions because of allegations of torture during the interrogations that led to the German soldiers' confessions. He charged that the U.S. Army was engaged in a coverup of judicial misconduct, but never presented any evidence to support the accusation. Shortly after this, a poll of the Senate press corps voted McCarthy "the worst U.S. senator" currently in office.

McCarthy experienced a meteoric rise in national profile on February 9, 1950, when he gave a Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. His words in the speech are a matter of some debate, as no audio recording was saved. However, it is generally agreed that he produced a piece of paper that he claimed contained a list of known Communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is usually quoted to have said: "The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205-a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

There is some dispute about whether or not McCarthy actually gave the number of people on the list as being "205" or "57". In a later telegram to President Truman, and when entering the speech into the Congressional Record, he used the number 57. The origin of the number 205 can be traced: in later debates on the Senate floor, McCarthy referred to a 1946 letter that then-Secretary of State James Byrnes sent to Congressman Adolph J. Sabath. In that letter, Byrnes said State Department security investigations had resulted in "recommendation against permanent employment" for 284 persons, and that 79 of these had been removed from their jobs; this left 205 still on the State Department's payroll. In fact, by the time of McCarthy's speech only about 65 of the employees mentioned in the Byrnes letter were still with the State Department, and all of these had undergone further security checks.

At the time of McCarthy's speech, communism was a significant concern in the United States. This concern was exacerbated by the actions of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, the victory of the communists in the Chinese Civil War, the Soviets' development of a nuclear weapon the year before, and by the contemporary controversy surrounding Alger Hiss and the confession of Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs. With this background and due to the sensational nature of McCarthy's charge against the State Department, the Wheeling speech soon attracted a flood of press interest in McCarthy's claim.

McCarthy himself was taken aback by the massive media response to the Wheeling speech, and he was accused of continually revising both his charges and figures. In Salt Lake City, Utah, a few days later, he cited a figure of 57, and in the Senate on February 20, 1950, he claimed 81. During a five-hour speech, McCarthy presented a case-by-case analysis of his 81 "loyalty risks" employed at the State Department. It is widely accepted that most of McCarthy's cases were selected from the so-called "Lee list", a report that had been compiled three years earlier for the House Appropriations Committee. Led by a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent named Robert E. Lee, the House investigators had reviewed security clearance documents on State Department employees, and had determined that there were "incidents of inefficiencies" in the security reviews of 108 employees. McCarthy hid the source of his list, stating that he had penetrated the "iron curtain" of State Department secrecy with the aid of "some good, loyal Americans in the State Department". In reciting the information from the Lee list cases, McCarthy consistently exaggerated, representing the hearsay of witnesses as facts and converting phrases such as "inclined towards Communism" to "a Communist".

In response to McCarthy's charges, the Senate voted unanimously to investigate, and the Tydings Committee hearings were called. This was a subcommittee of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations set up in February 1950 to conduct "a full and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or have been, employed by the Department of State". Many Democrats were incensed at McCarthy's attack on the State Department of a Democratic administration, and had hoped to use the hearings to discredit him. The Democratic chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Millard Tydings, was reported to have said, "Let me have him [McCarthy] for three days in public hearings, and he'll never show his face in the Senate again."

During the hearings, McCarthy moved on from his original unnamed Lee list cases and used the hearings to make charges against nine specific people: Dorothy Kenyon, Esther Brunauer, Haldore Hanson, Gustavo Durán, Owen Lattimore, Harlow Shapley, Frederick Schuman, John S. Service, and Philip Jessup. Some of them no longer worked for the State Department, or never had; all had previously been the subject of charges of varying worth and validity. Owen Lattimore became a particular focus of McCarthy's, who at one point described him as a "top Russian spy". Throughout the hearings, McCarthy employed colorful rhetoric, but produced no substantial evidence, to support his accusations.[citation needed ]

From its beginning, the Tydings Committee was marked by partisan infighting. Its final report, written by the Democratic majority, concluded that the individuals on McCarthy's list were neither Communists nor pro-communist, and said the State Department had an effective security program. The Tydings Report labeled McCarthy's charges a "fraud and a hoax", and said that the result of McCarthy's actions was to "confuse and divide the American people ... to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves". Republicans responded in kind, with William E. Jenner stating that Tydings was guilty of "the most brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history". The full Senate voted three times on whether to accept the report, and each time the voting was precisely divided along party lines.

From 1950 onward, McCarthy continued to exploit the fear of Communism and to press his accusations that the government was failing to deal with Communism within its ranks. McCarthy also began investigations into the numerous homosexuals working in the foreign policy bureaucracy, who were considered prime candidates for blackmail by the Soviets. These accusations received wide publicity, increased his approval rating, and gained him a powerful national following.

"In Congress, there was little doubt that homosexuals did not belong in sensitive government positions." Since the late 1940s, the government had been dismissing about five homosexuals a month from civilian posts; by 1954, the number had grown twelve-fold. In the opinion of one writer, "Mixed in with the hysterics were some logic, though: homosexuals faced condemnation and discrimination, and most of them-wishing to conceal their orientation-were vulnerable to blackmail." DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter was called to Congress to testify on homosexuals being employed at the CIA. He said, "The use of homosexuals as a control mechanism over individuals recruited for espionage is a generally accepted technique which has been used at least on a limited basis for many years." As soon as the DCI said these words, his aide signaled to take the remainder of the DCI's testimony off the record. Political historian David Barrett uncovered Hillenkoetter's notes, which reveal the remainder of the statement: "While this agency will never employ homosexuals on its rolls, it might conceivably be necessary, and in the past has actually been valuable, to use known homosexuals as agents in the field. I am certain that if Josef Stalin or a member of the Politburo or a high satellite official were known to be a homosexual, no member of this committee or of the Congress would balk against our use of any technique to penetrate their operations ... after all, intelligence and espionage is, at best, an extremely dirty business." The senators reluctantly agreed the CIA had to be flexible.

McCarthy's methods also brought on the disapproval and opposition of many. Barely a month after McCarthy's Wheeling speech, the term "McCarthyism" was coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block. Block and others used the word as a synonym for demagoguery, baseless defamation, and mudslinging. Later, it would be embraced by McCarthy and some of his supporters. "McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled," McCarthy said in a 1952 speech, and later that year, he published a book titled McCarthyism: The Fight For America.

McCarthy sought to discredit his critics and political opponents by accusing them of being Communists or communist sympathizers. In the 1950 Maryland Senate election, McCarthy campaigned for John Marshall Butler in his race against four-term incumbent Millard Tydings, with whom McCarthy had been in conflict during the Tydings Committee hearings. In speeches supporting Butler, McCarthy accused Tydings of "protecting Communists" and "shielding traitors." McCarthy's staff was heavily involved in the campaign, and collaborated in the production of a campaign tabloid that contained a composite photograph doctored to make it appear that Tydings was in intimate conversation with Communist leader Earl Russell Browder. A Senate subcommittee later investigated this election and referred to it as "a despicable, back-street type of campaign," as well as recommending that the use of defamatory literature in a campaign be made grounds for expulsion from the Senate. The pamphlet was clearly labeled a composite. McCarthy said it was "wrong" to distribute it; though staffer Jean Kerr thought it was fine. After he lost the election by almost 40,000 votes, Tydings claimed foul play.

In 1950 McCarthy assaulted journalist Drew Pearson in the cloakroom at the Sulgrave Club, reportedly kneeing him in the groin. McCarthy, who admitted the assault, claimed he merely "slapped" Pearson. In 1952, using rumors collected by Pearson, Nevada publisher Hank Greenspun wrote that McCarthy was a homosexual. The major journalistic media refused to print the story, and no notable McCarthy biographer has accepted the rumor as probable. In 1953, McCarthy married Jean Fraser Kerr, a researcher in his office. In January 1957 McCarthy and his wife adopted a baby girl, whom they named Tierney Elizabeth McCarthy.

McCarthy and President Truman clashed often during the years both held office. McCarthy characterized Truman and the Democratic Party as soft on, or even in league with, Communists, and spoke of the Democrats' "twenty years of treason". Truman, in turn, once referred to McCarthy as "the best asset the Kremlin has", calling McCarthy's actions an attempt to "sabotage the foreign policy of the United States" in a cold war and comparing it to shooting American soldiers in the back in a hot war. It was the Truman Administration's State Department that McCarthy accused of harboring 205 (or 57 or 81) "known Communists". Truman's Secretary of Defense, George Catlett Marshall, was the target of some of McCarthy's most vitriolic rhetoric. Marshall had been Army Chief of Staff during World War II and was also Truman's former Secretary of State. Marshall was a highly respected general and statesman, remembered today as the architect of victory and peace, the latter based on the Marshall Plan for post-war reconstruction of Europe, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. McCarthy made a lengthy speech on Marshall, later published in 1951 as a book titled America's Retreat From Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall. Marshall had been involved in American foreign policy with China, and McCarthy charged that Marshall was directly responsible for the loss of China to Communism. In the speech McCarthy also implied that Marshall was guilty of treason; declared that "if Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country's interest"; and most famously, accused him of being part of "a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man".

One of the strongest bases of anti-Communist sentiment in the United States was the Catholic community, which constituted over 20% of the national vote. McCarthy identified himself as Catholic, and although the great majority of Catholics were Democrats, as his fame as a leading anti-Communist grew, he became popular in Catholic communities across the country, with strong support from many leading Catholics, diocesan newspapers, and Catholic journals. At the same time, some Catholics opposed McCarthy, notably the anti-Communist author Father John Francis Cronin and the influential journal Commonweal.

McCarthy established a bond with the powerful Kennedy family, which had high visibility among Catholics. McCarthy became a close friend of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., himself a fervent anti-Communist, and he was also a frequent guest at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. He dated two of Kennedy's daughters, Patricia and Eunice. It has been stated that McCarthy was godfather to Robert F. Kennedy's first child, Kathleen Kennedy. This claim has been acknowledged by Robert's wife and Kathleen's mother Ethel, though Kathleen later claimed that she looked at her christening certificate and that her actual godfather was Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart professor Daniel Walsh.

Robert Kennedy was chosen by McCarthy to be a counsel for his investigatory committee, but he resigned after six months due to disagreements with McCarthy and Committee Counsel Roy Marcus Cohn. Joseph Kennedy had a national network of contacts and became a vocal supporter, building McCarthy's popularity among Catholics and making sizable contributions to McCarthy's campaigns. The Kennedy patriarch hoped that one of his sons would be president. Mindful of the anti-Catholic prejudice which Al Smith faced during his 1928 campaign for that office, Joseph Kennedy supported McCarthy as a national Catholic politician who might pave the way for a younger Kennedy's presidential candidacy.

Unlike many Democrats, John F. Kennedy, who served in the Senate with McCarthy from 1953 until the latter's death in 1957, never attacked McCarthy. McCarthy did not campaign for Kennedy's 1952 opponent, Republican incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., due to his friendship with the Kennedys and, reportedly, a $50,000 donation from Joseph Kennedy. Lodge lost despite Eisenhower winning the state in the presidential election. When a speaker at a February 1952 final club dinner stated that he was glad that McCarthy had not attended Harvard College, an angry Kennedy jumped up, denounced the speaker, and left the event. When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. asked Kennedy why he avoided criticizing McCarthy, Kennedy responded by saying, "Hell, half my voters in Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero".

During the 1952 presidential election, the Eisenhower campaign toured Wisconsin with McCarthy. In a speech delivered in Green Bay, Eisenhower declared that while he agreed with McCarthy's goals, he disagreed with his methods. In draft versions of his speech, Eisenhower had also included a strong defense of his mentor, George Marshall, which was a direct rebuke of McCarthy's frequent attacks. However, under the advice of conservative colleagues who were fearful that Eisenhower could lose Wisconsin if he alienated McCarthy supporters, he deleted this defense from later versions of his speech. The deletion was discovered by William H. Laurence, a reporter for The New York Times, and featured on its front page the next day. Eisenhower was widely criticized for giving up his personal convictions, and the incident became the low point of his campaign.

With his victory in the 1952 presidential race, Dwight Eisenhower became the first Republican president in 20 years. The Republican party also held a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate. After being elected president, Eisenhower made it clear to those close to him that he did not approve of McCarthy and he worked actively to diminish his power and influence. Still, he never directly confronted McCarthy or criticized him by name in any speech, thus perhaps prolonging McCarthy's power by giving the impression that even the President was afraid to criticize him directly. Oshinsky disputes this, stating that "Eisenhower was known as a harmonizer, a man who could get diverse factions to work toward a common goal. ... Leadership, he explained, meant patience and conciliation, not 'hitting people over the head.'"

McCarthy won reelection in 1952 with 54% of the vote, defeating former Wisconsin State Attorney General Thomas E. Fairchild but, as stated above, badly trailing a Republican ticket which otherwise swept the state of Wisconsin; all the other Republican winners, including Eisenhower himself, received at least 60% of the Wisconsin vote. Those who expected that party loyalty would cause McCarthy to tone down his accusations of Communists being harbored within the government were soon disappointed. Eisenhower had never been an admirer of McCarthy, and their relationship became more hostile once Eisenhower was in office. In a November 1953 speech that was carried on national television, McCarthy began by praising the Eisenhower Administration for removing "1,456 Truman holdovers who were ... gotten rid of because of Communist connections and activities or perversion." He then went on to complain that John Paton Davies Jr. was still "on the payroll after eleven months of the Eisenhower Administration," even though Davies had actually been dismissed three weeks earlier, and repeated an unsubstantiated accusation that Davies had tried to "put Communists and espionage agents in key spots in the Central Intelligence Agency." In the same speech, he criticized Eisenhower for not doing enough to secure the release of missing American pilots shot down over China during the Korean War. By the end of 1953, McCarthy had altered the "twenty years of treason" catchphrase he had coined for the preceding Democratic administrations and began referring to "twenty- one years of treason" to include Eisenhower's first year in office.

As McCarthy became increasingly combative towards the Eisenhower Administration, Eisenhower faced repeated calls that he confront McCarthy directly. Eisenhower refused, saying privately "nothing would please him [McCarthy] more than to get the publicity that would be generated by a public repudiation by the President." On several occasions Eisenhower is reported to have said of McCarthy that he did not want to "get down in the gutter with that guy."

With the beginning of his second term as senator in 1953, McCarthy was made chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. According to some reports, Republican leaders were growing wary of McCarthy's methods and gave him this relatively mundane panel rather than the Internal Security Subcommittee-the committee normally involved with investigating Communists-thus putting McCarthy "where he can't do any harm," in the words of Senate Majority Leader Robert A. Taft. However, the Committee on Government Operations included the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and the mandate of this subcommittee was sufficiently flexible to allow McCarthy to use it for his own investigations of Communists in the government. McCarthy appointed Roy Cohn as chief counsel and 27-year-old Robert F. Kennedy as an assistant counsel to the subcommittee. Cohn brought with him, as his assistant, Gerard David Schine, heir to a hotel-chain fortune, who would bear much responsibility for triggering McCarthy's eventual downfall.

This subcommittee would be the scene of some of McCarthy's most publicized exploits. When the records of the closed executive sessions of the subcommittee under McCarthy's chairmanship were made public in 2003-04, Senators Susan Collins and Carl Levin wrote the following in their preface to the documents:

Senator McCarthy's zeal to uncover subversion and espionage led to disturbing excesses. His browbeating tactics destroyed careers of people who were not involved in the infiltration of our government. His freewheeling style caused both the Senate and the Subcommittee to revise the rules governing future investigations, and prompted the courts to act to protect the Constitutional rights of witnesses at Congressional hearings. ... These hearings are a part of our national past that we can neither afford to forget nor permit to re-occur.

The subcommittee first investigated allegations of Communist influence in the Voice of America, at that time administered by the State Department's United States Information Agency. Many VOA personnel were questioned in front of television cameras and a packed press gallery, with McCarthy lacing his questions with hostile innuendo and false accusations. A few VOA employees alleged Communist influence on the content of broadcasts, but none of the charges were substantiated. Morale at VOA was badly damaged, and one of its engineers committed suicide during McCarthy's investigation. Ed Kretzman, a policy advisor for the service, would later comment that it was VOA's "darkest hour when Senator McCarthy and his chief hatchet man, Roy Cohn, almost succeeded in muffling it."

The subcommittee then turned to the overseas library program of the International Information Agency. Cohn toured Europe examining the card catalogs of the State Department libraries looking for works by authors he deemed inappropriate. McCarthy then recited the list of supposedly pro-communist authors before his subcommittee and the press. The State Department bowed to McCarthy and ordered its overseas librarians to remove from their shelves "material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc." Some libraries went as far as burning the newly-forbidden books. Shortly after this, in one of his public criticisms of McCarthy, President Eisenhower urged Americans: "Don't join the book burners. ... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."

Soon after receiving the chair to the Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy appointed J. B. Matthews as staff director of the subcommittee. One of the nation's foremost anti-communists, Matthews had formerly been staff director for the House Un-American Activities Committee. The appointment became controversial when it was learned that Matthews had recently written an article titled "Reds and Our Churches", which opened with the sentence, "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen." A group of senators denounced this "shocking and unwarranted attack against the American clergy" and demanded that McCarthy dismiss Matthews. McCarthy initially refused to do this. As the controversy mounted, however, and the majority of his own subcommittee joined the call for Matthews's ouster, McCarthy finally yielded and accepted his resignation. For some McCarthy opponents, this was a signal defeat of the senator, showing he was not as invincible as he had formerly seemed.

In autumn 1953, McCarthy's committee began its ill-fated inquiry into the United States Army. This began with McCarthy opening an investigation into the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth. McCarthy, newly married to Jean Kerr, cut short his honeymoon to open the investigation. He garnered some headlines with stories of a dangerous spy ring among the army researchers, but after weeks of hearings, nothing came of his investigations. Unable to expose any signs of subversion, McCarthy focused instead on the case of Irving Peress, a New York dentist who had been drafted into the army in 1952 and promoted to major in November 1953. Shortly thereafter it came to the attention of the military bureaucracy that Peress, who was a member of the left-wing American Labor Party, had declined to answer questions about his political affiliations on a loyalty-review form. Peress's superiors were therefore ordered to discharge him from the army within 90 days. McCarthy subpoenaed Peress to appear before his subcommittee on January 30, 1954. Peress refused to answer McCarthy's questions, citing his rights under the Fifth Amendment. McCarthy responded by sending a message to Secretary of the Army, Robert T. Stevens, demanding that Peress be court-martialed. On that same day, Peress asked for his pending discharge from the army to be effected immediately, and the next day Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, his commanding officer at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, gave him an honorable separation from the army. At McCarthy's encouragement, "Who promoted Peress?" became a rallying cry among many anti-communists and McCarthy supporters. In fact, and as McCarthy knew, Peress had been promoted automatically through the provisions of the Doctor Draft Law, for which McCarthy had voted.

Early in 1954, the U.S. Army accused McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, of improperly pressuring the army to give favorable treatment to G. David Schine, a former aide to McCarthy and a friend of Cohn's, who was then serving in the army as a private. McCarthy claimed that the accusation was made in bad faith, in retaliation for his questioning of Zwicker the previous year. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, usually chaired by McCarthy himself, was given the task of adjudicating these conflicting charges. Republican senator Karl Mundt was appointed to chair the committee, and the Army-McCarthy hearings convened on April 22, 1954.

The army consulted with an attorney familiar with McCarthy to determine the best approach to attacking him. Based on his recommendation, it decided not to pursue McCarthy on the issue of communists in government: "The attorney feels it is almost impossible to counter McCarthy effectively on the issue of kicking Communists out of Government, because he generally has some basis, no matter how slight, for his claim of Communist connection."

Of far greater importance to McCarthy than the committee's inconclusive final report was the negative effect that the extensive exposure had on his popularity. Many in the audience saw him as bullying, reckless, and dishonest, and the daily newspaper summaries of the hearings were also frequently unfavorable. Late in the hearings, Senator Stuart Symington made an angry and prophetic remark to McCarthy. Upon being told by McCarthy that "You're not fooling anyone", Symington replied: "Senator, the American people have had a look at you now for six weeks; you're not fooling anyone, either." In Gallup polls of January 1954, 50% of those polled had a positive opinion of McCarthy. In June, that number had fallen to 34%. In the same polls, those with a negative opinion of McCarthy increased from 29% to 45%.

An increasing number of Republicans and conservatives were coming to see McCarthy as a liability to the party and to anti-communism. Congressman George H. Bender noted, "There is a growing impatience with the Republican Party. McCarthyism has become a synonym for witch-hunting, Star Chamber methods, and the denial of ... civil liberties." Frederick Woltman, a reporter with a long-standing reputation as a staunch anti-communist, wrote a five-part series of articles criticizing McCarthy in the New York World-Telegram. He stated that McCarthy "has become a major liability to the cause of anti-communism", and accused him of "wild twisting of facts and near-facts [that] repels authorities in the field".

The most famous incident in the hearings was an exchange between McCarthy and the army's chief legal representative, Joseph Nye Welch. On June 9, 1954, the 30th day of the hearings, Welch challenged Roy Cohn to provide U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. with McCarthy's list of 130 Communists or subversives in defense plants "before the sun goes down". McCarthy stepped in and said that if Welch was so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on a man in his Boston law office named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive lawyers' association. In an impassioned defense of Fisher, Welch responded, "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness ..." When McCarthy resumed his attack, Welch interrupted him: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" When McCarthy once again persisted, Welch cut him off and demanded the chairman "call the next witness". At that point, the gallery erupted in applause and a recess was called.

Edward R. Murrow, See It Now

Even before McCarthy's clash with Welch in the hearings, one of the most prominent attacks on McCarthy's methods was an episode of the television documentary series , hosted by journalist Edward R. Murrow, which was broadcast on March 9, 1954. Titled "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy", the episode consisted largely of clips of McCarthy speaking. In these clips, McCarthy accuses the Democratic party of "twenty years of treason", describes the American Civil Liberties Union as "listed as 'a front for, and doing the work of', the Communist Party", and berates and harangues various witnesses, including General Zwicker.

In his conclusion, Murrow said of McCarthy:

No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men-not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it-and rather successfully. Cassius was right: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

The following week, See It Now ran another episode critical of McCarthy, this one focusing on the case of Annie Lee Moss, an African-American army clerk who was the target of one of McCarthy's investigations. The Murrow shows, together with the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of the same year, were the major causes of a nationwide popular opinion backlash against McCarthy, in part because for the first time his statements were being publicly challenged by noteworthy figures. To counter the negative publicity, McCarthy appeared on See It Now on April 6, 1954, and made a number of charges against the popular Murrow, including the accusation that he colluded with VOKS, the "Russian espionage and propaganda organization". This response did not go over well with viewers, and the result was a further decline in McCarthy's popularity.[citation needed ]

On March 18, 1954 Sauk-Prairie Star editor Leroy Gore of Sauk City, Wisconsin urged the recall of McCarthy in a front-page editorial that ran alongside a sample petition that readers could fill out and mail to the newspaper. A Republican and former McCarthy supporter, Gore cited the senator with subverting President Eisenhower's authority, disrespecting Wisconsin's own Gen. Ralph Wise Zwicker and ignoring the plight of Wisconsin dairy farmers faced with price-slashing surpluses.

Despite critics' claims that a recall attempt was foolhardy, the "Joe Must Go" movement caught fire and was backed by a diverse coalition including other Republican leaders, Democrats, businessmen, farmers and students. Wisconsin's constitution stipulates the number of signatures needed to force a recall election must exceed one-quarter the number of voters in the most recent gubernatorial election, requiring the anti-McCarthy movement to gather some 404,000 signatures in sixty days. With little support from organized labor or the state Democratic Party, the roughly organized recall effort attracted national attention, particularly during the concurrent Army-McCarthy hearings.[citation needed ]

Following the deadline of June 5, the final number of signatures was never determined because the petitions were sent out of state to avoid a subpoena from the Sauk County district attorney, an ardent McCarthy supporter who was investigating the leaders of the recall campaign on the grounds that they had violated Wisconsin's Corrupt Practices Act. Chicago newspapermen later tallied 335,000 names while another 50,000 were said to be hidden in Minneapolis, with other lists buried on Sauk County farms.

Several members of the U.S. Senate had opposed McCarthy well before 1953. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican, delivered her " Declaration of Conscience" on June 1, 1950, calling for an end to the use of smear tactics without mentioning McCarthy or anyone else by name. Six other Republican senators- Wayne Morse, Irving Ives, Charles W. Tobey, Edward John Thye, George Aiken, and Robert C. Hendrickson -joined her in condemning McCarthy's tactics. McCarthy referred to Smith and her fellow senators as "Snow White and the six dwarfs".

On March 9, 1954, Vermont Republican senator Ralph E. Flanders gave a humor-laced speech on the Senate floor, questioning McCarthy's tactics in fighting communism, likening McCarthyism to "house-cleaning" with "much clatter and hullabaloo". He recommended that McCarthy turn his attention to the worldwide encroachment of Communism outside North America. In a June 1 speech, Flanders compared McCarthy to Adolf Hitler, accusing him of spreading "division and confusion" and saying, "Were the Junior Senator from Wisconsin in the pay of the Communists he could not have done a better job for them." On June 11, Flanders introduced a resolution to have McCarthy removed as chair of his committees. Although there were many in the Senate who believed that some sort of disciplinary action against McCarthy was warranted, there was no clear majority supporting this resolution. Some of the resistance was due to concern about usurping the Senate's rules regarding committee chairs and seniority. Flanders next introduced a resolution to censure McCarthy. The resolution was initially written without any reference to particular actions or misdeeds on McCarthy's part. As Flanders put it, "It was not his breaches of etiquette, or of rules or sometimes even of laws which is so disturbing," but rather his overall pattern of behavior. Ultimately a "bill of particulars" listing 46 charges was added to the censure resolution. A special committee, chaired by Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins, was appointed to study and evaluate the resolution. This committee opened hearings on August 31.

After two months of hearings and deliberations, the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on two of the 46 counts: his contempt of the Subcommittee on Rules and Administration, which had called him to testify in 1951 and 1952, and his abuse of General Zwicker in 1954. The Zwicker count was dropped by the full Senate on the grounds that McCarthy's conduct was arguably "induced" by Zwicker's own behavior. In place of this count, a new one was drafted regarding McCarthy's statements about the Watkins Committee itself.

The two counts on which the Senate ultimately voted were:

That McCarthy had "failed to co-operate with the Sub-committee on Rules and Administration", and "repeatedly abused the members who were trying to carry out assigned duties ..."

That McCarthy had charged "three members of the [Watkins] Select Committee with 'deliberate deception' and 'fraud' ... that the special Senate session ... was a 'lynch party'", and had characterized the committee "as the 'unwitting handmaiden', 'involuntary agent' and 'attorneys in fact' of the Communist Party", and had "acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity".

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22. The Democrats present unanimously favored condemnation and the Republicans were split evenly. The only senator not on record was John F. Kennedy, who was hospitalized for back surgery; Kennedy never indicated how he would have voted. Immediately after the vote, Senator H. Styles Bridges, a McCarthy supporter, argued that the resolution was "not a censure resolution" because the word "condemn" rather than "censure" was used in the final draft. The word "censure" was then removed from the title of the resolution, though it is generally regarded and referred to as a censure of McCarthy, both by historians and in Senate documents. McCarthy himself said, "I wouldn't exactly call it a vote of confidence." He added, "I don't feel I've been lynched." Indiana Senator William E. Jenner, one of McCarthy's friends and fellow Republicans likened McCarthy's conduct, however, to that of "the kid who came to the party and peed in the lemonade."

After his condemnation and censure, Joseph McCarthy continued to perform his senatorial duties for another two and a half years. His career as a major public figure, however, had been ruined. His colleagues in the Senate avoided him; his speeches on the Senate floor were delivered to a near-empty chamber or they were received with intentional and conspicuous displays of inattention. The press that had once recorded his every public statement now ignored him, and outside speaking engagements dwindled almost to nothing. President Eisenhower, finally freed of McCarthy's political intimidation, quipped to his Cabinet that McCarthyism was now "McCarthywasm".

Still, McCarthy continued to rail against Communism. He warned against attendance at summit conferences with "the Reds", saying that "you cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers ... without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder." He declared that "co-existence with Communists is neither possible nor honorable nor desirable. Our long-term objective must be the eradication of Communism from the face of the earth." In one of his final acts in the Senate, McCarthy opposed President Eisenhower's nomination to the Supreme Court of William J. Brennan, after reading a speech Brennan had given shortly beforehand in which he characterized McCarthy's anti-Communist investigations as "witch hunts". McCarthy's opposition failed to gain any traction, however, and he was the only senator to vote against Brennan's confirmation.

McCarthy's biographers agree that he was a changed man after the censure; declining both physically and emotionally, he became a "pale ghost of his former self" in the words of Fred J. Cook. It was reported that McCarthy suffered from cirrhosis of the liver and was frequently hospitalized for alcohol abuse. Numerous eyewitnesses, including Senate aide George Reedy and journalist Tom Wicker, reported finding him alarmingly drunk in the Senate. Journalist Richard Rovere (1959) wrote:

He had always been a heavy drinker, and there were times in those seasons of discontent when he drank more than ever. But he was not always drunk. He went on the wagon (for him this meant beer instead of whiskey) for days and weeks at a time. The difficulty toward the end was that he couldn't hold the stuff. He went to pieces on his second or third drink, and he did not snap back quickly.

McCarthy had also become addicted to morphine. Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, became aware of McCarthy's addiction in the 1950s, and demanded he stop using the drug. McCarthy refused. In Anslinger's memoir, The Murderers, McCarthy is anonymously quoted as saying:

I wouldn't try to do anything about it, Commissioner ... It will be the worse for you ... and if it winds up in a public scandal and that should hurt this country, I wouldn't care [. . .] The choice is yours.

Anslinger decided to give McCarthy access to morphine in secret from a pharmacy in Washington, DC. The morphine was paid for by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, right up to McCarthy's death. Anslinger never publicly named McCarthy, and he threatened, with prison, a journalist who had uncovered the story. However, McCarthy's identity was known to Anslinger's agents, and journalist Maxine Cheshire confirmed his identity with Will Oursler, co-author of The Murderers, in 1978.

McCarthy died in the Bethesda Naval Hospital on Thursday, May 2, 1957, at the age of 48. His death certificate listed the cause of death as " Hepatitis, acute, cause unknown"; previously doctors had not reported him to be in critical condition. It was hinted in the press that he died of alcoholism (cirrhosis of the liver), an estimation that is now accepted by modern biographers. He was given a state funeral that was attended by 70 senators, and a Solemn Pontifical Requiem Mass was celebrated before more than 100 priests and 2,000 others at Washington's St. Matthew's Cathedral. Thousands of people viewed his body in Washington. He was buried in St. Mary's Parish Cemetery, Appleton, Wisconsin, where more than 17,000 people filed through St. Mary's Church in order to pay him their last respects. Three senators- George W. Malone, William E. Jenner, and Herman Welker-had flown from Washington to Appleton on the plane which carried McCarthy's casket. Robert F. Kennedy quietly attended the funeral in Wisconsin. McCarthy was survived by his wife, Jean, and their adopted daughter, Tierney.

William Bennett, former Reagan Administration Secretary of Education, summed up his perspective in his 2007 book America: The Last Best Hope:

The cause of anti-communism, which united millions of Americans and which gained the support of Democrats, Republicans and independents, was undermined by Sen. Joe McCarthy ... McCarthy addressed a real problem: disloyal elements within the U.S. government. But his approach to this real problem was to cause untold grief to the country he claimed to love ... Worst of all, McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-communism. He discredited legitimate efforts to counter Soviet subversion of American institutions.

From the start of his notoriety, McCarthy served as a favorite subject for political cartoonists. He was traditionally depicted in a negative light, normally pertaining to McCarthyism and his accusations. Herblock's cartoon that coined the term McCarthyism appeared less than two months after the senator's now famous February 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia.

In 1951, Ray Bradbury published The Fireman, an allegory on suppression of ideas. This served as the basis for Fahrenheit 451 published in 1953. Bradbury said that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the time (during the McCarthy era) about the threat of book burning in the United States.

Bob Hope was one of the first comedians to make jokes about Senator Joe McCarthy. During his 1952 Christmas show, Bob Hope makes a joke about Santa Claus wearing a red suit and Santa writing to Bob to let Joe McCarthy know he was going to wear his red suit despite the Red Scare. Hope continued to offer McCarthy jokes as they were well received by most people, although he did receive some hate mail due to these jokes.

In 1953, the popular daily comic strip introduced the character Simple J. Malarkey, a pugnacious and conniving wildcat with an unmistakable physical resemblance to McCarthy. After a worried Rhode Island newspaper editor protested to the syndicate that provided the strip, creator Walt Kelly began depicting the Malarkey character with a bag over his head, concealing his features. The explanation was that Malarkey was hiding from a Rhode Island Red hen, a clear reference to the controversy over the Malarkey character.

In 1953, playwright Arthur Miller published The Crucible, suggesting the Salem Witch Trials were analogous to McCarthyism.

As his fame grew, McCarthy increasingly became the target of ridicule and parody. He was impersonated by nightclub and radio impressionists and was satirized in magazine, on The Red Skelton Show, and elsewhere. Several comedy songs lampooning the senator were released in 1954, including "Point of Order" by Stan Freberg and Daws Butler, "Senator McCarthy Blues" by Hal Block, and unionist folk singer Joe Glazer's "Joe McCarthy's Band", sung to the tune of " McNamara's Band". Also in 1954, the radio comedy team Bob and Ray parodied McCarthy with the character "Commissioner Carstairs" in their soap opera spoof "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife". That same year, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio network broadcast a satire, The Investigator, whose title character was a clear imitation of McCarthy. A recording of the show became popular in the United States, and was reportedly played by President Eisenhower at cabinet meetings.

The 1953 short story Mr. Costello, Hero by Theodore Sturgeon was described by noted journalist and author Paul Williams as "the all-time great story about Senator Joseph McCarthy, who he was and how he did what he did."

Post-censure reaction

Mr. Costello, Hero was adapted in 1958 by X Minus One into a radio teleplay and broadcast on July 3, 1956. While the radio adaptation retains much of the story, it completely remakes the narrator and in fact gives him a line spoken in the original by Mr. Costello himself, thus changing the tone of the story considerably. In a 1977 interview Sturgeon commented that it was his concerns about the ongoing McCarthy Hearings that prompted him to write the story.

A more serious fictional portrayal of McCarthy played a central role in the 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon. The character of Senator John Iselin, a demagogic anti-communist, is closely modeled on McCarthy, even to the varying numbers of Communists he asserts are employed by the federal government. He remains a major character in the 1962 film version.

The 1962 novel Advise and Consent by Allen Drury features an overzealous demagogue, Senator Fred Van Ackerman, based on McCarthy. Although the fictional senator is an ultra liberal who proposes surrender to the Soviet Union, his portrayal strongly resembles the popular perception of McCarthy's character and methods.

McCarthy was portrayed by Peter Boyle in the 1977 Emmy-winning television movie Tail Gunner Joe, a dramatization of McCarthy's life. Archival footage of McCarthy himself was used in the 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck about Edward R. Murrow and the See It Now episode that challenged McCarthy. McCarthy was also portrayed by Joe Don Baker in the 1992 HBO film Citizen Cohn. In the German-French docu-drama The Real American - Joe McCarthy (2012), directed by Lutz Hachmeister, McCarthy is portrayed by the British actor and comedian John Sessions. In Lee Daniels' 2020 film, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, McCarthy is portrayed by actor Randy Davison.

R.E.M.'s song "Exhuming McCarthy", from their 1987 album , deals largely with McCarthy and contains sound clips from the Army-McCarthy Hearings.

'Joe' McCarthy is also mentioned in Billy Joel's 1989 song " We Didn't Start the Fire."

McCarthyism is one of the subjects of Barbara Kingsolver's novel .

Historian John Earl Haynes, who studied the Venona decryptions extensively, challenged Herman's efforts to rehabilitate McCarthy, arguing that McCarthy's attempts to "make anti-communism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened [the post-War] anti-Communist consensus", thereby ultimately harming anti-Communist efforts more than helping them. Haynes concluded that, of the 159 people who were identified on lists which were used or referenced by McCarthy, evidence substantially proved that nine of them had aided Soviet espionage efforts. His own view was that a number of those on the lists above, perhaps a majority, likely posed some form of security risk, but others, a minority but a significant one, likely were not, and that several were indisputably no risk at all.

In Blacklisted by history : the untold story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his fight against America's enemies, conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans argued that evidence from the Venona documents shows significant penetration by Soviet agents.

Anderson, Jack and May, Ronald W (1952). McCarthy: the man, the Senator, the "ism," Beacon Press.

Belfrage, Cedric (1989). The American Inquisition, 1945-1960: A Profile of the "McCarthy Era". Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 0-938410-87-3.

Caballero, Raymond. McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.

Crosby, Donald F. "The Jesuits and Joe McCarthy". Church History 1977 46(3): 374-388. ISSN 0009-6407 Fulltext: in Jstor

Gauger, Michael. "Flickering Images: Live Television Coverage and Viewership of the Army-McCarthy Hearings". Historian 2005 67(4): 678-693. ISSN 0018-2370 Fulltext: in Swetswise, Ingenta and Ebsco. Audience ratings show that few people watched the hearings.

Luthin, Reinhard H. (1954). "Joseph McCarthy: Wisconsin". American Demagogues: Twentieth Century. Beacon Press. ASIN B0007DN37C. OCLC 1098334.

Morgan, Ted (November-December 2003). "Judge Joe: How the youngest judge in Wisconsin's history became the country's most notorious senator". Legal Affairs.

O'Brien, Michael (1980). McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin. Olympic Marketing Corp. ISBN 0-8262-0319-1.

Reeves, Thomas C. (Spring 1997). "The Search for Joe McCarthy". Wisconsin Magazine of History. 60 (3): 185-196.

Rosteck, Thomas (1994). See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: Television Documentary and the Politics of Representation. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 0-8173-5191-4.

Wicker, Tom (2006). Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy. Harcourt. ISBN 0-15-101082-X.

Adams, John G. (1983). Without Precedent: The Story of the Death of McCarthyism. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-30230-X.

"Censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1954)". The United States Department of State. Archived from the original on November 20, 2007.

"Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum".

McCarthy, Joseph (1952). Fight for America. Devin-Adair. ISBN 0-405-09960-6.

Edward R. Murrow & Fred W. Friendly (Producers) (1991). Edward R. Murrow: The McCarthy Years (DVD (from 'See it Now' TV News show)). CBS News/Docudrama.

"Senate Committee Transcripts, 107th Congress". Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Archived from the original on July 16, 2006.

"Transcripts, Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations". U.S. Government Printing Office. 2003.

United States Congress. "Joseph McCarthy (id: M000315)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Retrieved on 2008-07-11

"Papa" Prell's radio broadcast on "Tail Gunner Joe", including taped segments from the trial.

The McCarthy-Welch exchange

Joseph McCarthy Papers, Marquette University Library

A film clip "Longines Chronoscope with Sen. Joseph McCarthy (June 25, 1952)" is available at the Internet Archive

A film clip "Longines Chronoscope with Sen. Joseph McCarthy (September 29, 1952)" is available at the Internet Archive

FBI Memo Referencing 206 Communists in Government

Transcript: "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy" - Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, CBS Television, March 9, 1954 via UC Berkeley library

Transcript: "Joseph R. McCarthy: Rebuttal to Edward R. Murrow", See It Now, CBS Television, April 6, 1954 via UC Berkeley library

Documents on McCarthyism at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library

FBI file on Joseph McCarthy

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United States Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 - May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread communist subversion.

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What was the 'House of Un-American Activities?'

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What was the 'House of Un-American Activities?'

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The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having Communist ties.

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TED Talk about McCarthyism

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What is McCarthyism? And how did it happen? - Ellen Schrecker

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In the 1950s, as part of a campaign to expose suspected Communists, thousands of individuals were aggressively investigated and questioned before government panels. Named after its most notorious practitioner, the phenomenon known as McCarthyism destroyed lives and careers. But how di…

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McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to anarchism, communism, and socialism, and especially when the accusations are false or unproven and are made in a public and attention-grabbing manner.

The term originally referred to the controversial practices and policies of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and covers the period of the late 1940s through the 1950s. It was characterized by heightened political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals, and a campaign spreading fear of alleged communist and socialist influence on American institutions and of espionage by Soviet agents. After the mid-1950s, McCarthyism began to decline, mainly due to Joseph McCarthy's gradual loss of public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false, and sustained opposition from the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren on human rights grounds. The Warren Court made a series of rulings on civil and political rights that overturned several key laws and legislative directives, and helped bring an end to the Second Red Scare. Historians have suggested since the 1980s that as McCarthy's involvement was less central than that of others, a different and more accurate term should be used instead that more accurately conveys the breadth of the phenomenon, and that the term McCarthyism is now outdated. Ellen Schrecker has suggested that Hooverism after FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover is more appropriate.

What would become known as the McCarthy era began before McCarthy's rise to national fame. Following the breakdown of the wartime East-West alliance with the Soviet Union, and with many remembering the First Red Scare, President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order in 1947 to screen federal employees for possible association with organizations deemed "totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive", or advocating "to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means." The following year, the Czechoslovak coup by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia heightened concern in the West about Communist parties seizing power and the possibility of subversion. In 1949, a high-level State Department official was convicted of perjury in a case of espionage, and the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb. The Korean War started the next year, significantly raising tensions and fears of impending communist upheavals in the United States. In a speech in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of members of the Communist Party USA working in the State Department, which attracted substantial press attention, and the term McCarthyism was published for the first time in late March of that year in The Christian Science Monitor, along with a political cartoon by Herblock in The Washington Post. The term has since taken on a broader meaning, describing the excesses of similar efforts to crack down on alleged "subversive" elements. In the early 21st century, the term is used more generally to describe reckless and unsubstantiated accusations of treason and far-left extremism, along with demagogic personal attacks on the character and patriotism of political adversaries.

The primary targets for persecution were government employees, prominent figures in the entertainment industry, academics, left-wing politicians, and labor union activists. Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive and questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person's real or supposed leftist associations and beliefs were often exaggerated. Many people suffered loss of employment and the destruction of their careers and livelihoods as a result of the crackdowns on suspected communists, and some were outright imprisoned. Most of these reprisals were initiated by trial verdicts that were later overturned, laws that were later struck down as unconstitutional, dismissals for reasons later declared illegal or actionable, and extra-judiciary procedures, such as informal blacklists by employers and public institutions, that would come into general disrepute, though by then many lives had been ruined. The most notable examples of McCarthyism include the investigations of alleged communists that were conducted by Senator McCarthy, and the hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

The historical period that came to be known as the McCarthy era began well before Joseph McCarthy's own involvement in it. Many factors contributed to McCarthyism, some of them with roots in the First Red Scare (1917-20), inspired by communism's emergence as a recognized political force and widespread social disruption in the United States related to unionizing and anarchist activities. Owing in part to its success in organizing labor unions and its early opposition to fascism, and offering an alternative to the ills of capitalism during the Great Depression, the Communist Party of the United States increased its membership through the 1930s, reaching a peak of about 75,000 members in 1940-41. While the United States was engaged in World War II and allied with the Soviet Union, the issue of anti-communism was largely muted. With the end of World War II, the Cold War began almost immediately, as the Soviet Union installed communist puppet régimes in areas it had occupied across Central and Eastern Europe. In a March 1947 address to Congress, Truman enunciated a new foreign policy doctrine that committed the United States to opposing Soviet geopolitical expansion. This doctrine came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, and it guided United States support for anti-communist forces in Greece and later in China and elsewhere.

Although the Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley affairs had raised the issue of Soviet espionage in 1945, events in 1949 and 1950 sharply increased the sense of threat in the United States related to communism. The Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949, earlier than many analysts had expected, raising the stakes in the Cold War. That same year, Mao Zedong's communist army gained control of mainland China despite heavy American financial support of the opposing Kuomintang. In 1950, the Korean War began, pitting U.S., U.N., and South Korean forces against communists from North Korea and China.

During the following year, evidence of increased sophistication in Soviet Cold War espionage activities was found in the West. In January 1950, Alger Hiss, a high-level State Department official, was convicted of perjury. Hiss was in effect found guilty of espionage; the statute of limitations had run out for that crime, but he was convicted of having perjured himself when he denied that charge in earlier testimony before the HUAC. In Britain, Klaus Fuchs confessed to committing espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the War. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested in 1950 in the United States on charges of stealing atomic-bomb secrets for the Soviets, and were executed in 1953.

Other forces encouraged the rise of McCarthyism. The more conservative politicians in the United States had historically referred to progressive reforms, such as child labor laws and women's suffrage, as "communist" or "Red plots", trying to raise fears against such changes. They used similar terms during the 1930s and the Great Depression when opposing the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Many conservatives equated the New Deal with socialism or Communism, and thought the policies were evidence of too much influence by allegedly communist policy makers in the Roosevelt administration. In general, the vaguely defined danger of "Communist influence" was a more common theme in the rhetoric of anti-communist politicians than was espionage or any other specific activity.

McCarthy's involvement in these issues began publicly with a speech he made on Lincoln Day, February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He brandished a piece of paper, which he claimed contained a list of known communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is usually quoted as saying: "I have here in my hand a list of 205-a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." This speech resulted in a flood of press attention to McCarthy and helped establish his path to becoming one of the most recognized politicians in the United States.

The first recorded use of the term "McCarthyism" was in the Christian Science Monitor on March 28, 1950 ("Their little spree with McCarthyism is no aid to consultation"). The paper became one of the earliest and most consistent critics of the Senator. The next recorded use happened on the following day, in a political cartoon by Washington Post editorial cartoonist Herbert Block (Herblock). The cartoon depicts four leading Republicans trying to push an elephant (the traditional symbol of the Republican Party) to stand on a platform atop a teetering stack of ten tar buckets, the topmost of which is labeled "McCarthyism". Block later wrote:

"nothing [was] particularly ingenious about the term, which is simply used to represent a national affliction that can hardly be described in any other way. If anyone has a prior claim on it, he's welcome to the word and to the junior senator from Wisconsin along with it. I will also throw in a set of free dishes and a case of soap."

A number of anti-communist committees, panels, and "loyalty review boards" in federal, state, and local governments, as well as many private agencies, carried out investigations for small and large companies concerned about possible Communists in their work forces.

In Congress, the primary bodies that investigated Communist activities were the HUAC, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Between 1949 and 1954, a total of 109 investigations were carried out by these and other committees of Congress.

In the federal government, President Truman's Executive Order 9835 initiated a program of loyalty reviews for federal employees in 1947. It called for dismissal if there were "reasonable grounds ... for belief that the person involved is disloyal to the Government of the United States." Truman, a Democrat, was probably reacting in part to the Republican sweep in the 1946 Congressional election and felt a need to counter growing criticism from conservatives and anti-communists.

When President Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, he strengthened and extended Truman's loyalty review program, while decreasing the avenues of appeal available to dismissed employees. Hiram Bingham, chairman of the Civil Service Commission Loyalty Review Board, referred to the new rules he was obliged to enforce as "just not the American way of doing things." The following year, J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb, then working as a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission, was stripped of his security clearance after a four-week hearing. Oppenheimer had received a top-secret clearance in 1947, but was denied clearance in the harsher climate of 1954.

Similar loyalty reviews were established in many state and local government offices and some private industries across the nation. In 1958, an estimated one of every five employees in the United States was required to pass some sort of loyalty review. Once a person lost a job due to an unfavorable loyalty review, finding other employment could be very difficult. "A man is ruined everywhere and forever," in the words of the chairman of President Truman's Loyalty Review Board. "No responsible employer would be likely to take a chance in giving him a job."

The Department of Justice started keeping a list of organizations that it deemed subversive beginning in 1942. This list was first made public in 1948, when it included 78 groups. At its longest, it comprised 154 organizations, 110 of them identified as Communist. In the context of a loyalty review, membership in a listed organization was meant to raise a question, but not to be considered proof of disloyalty. One of the most common causes of suspicion was membership in the Washington Bookshop Association, a left-leaning organization that offered lectures on literature, classical music concerts, and discounts on books.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover designed President Truman's loyalty-security program, and its background investigations of employees were carried out by FBI agents. This was a major assignment that led to the number of agents in the bureau being increased from 3,559 in 1946 to 7,029 in 1952. Hoover's sense of the communist threat and the standards of evidence applied by his bureau resulted in thousands of government workers losing their jobs. Due to Hoover's insistence upon keeping the identity of his informers secret, most subjects of loyalty-security reviews were not allowed to cross-examine or know the identities of those who accused them. In many cases, they were not even told of what they were accused.

Hoover's influence extended beyond federal government employees and beyond the loyalty-security programs. The records of loyalty review hearings and investigations were supposed to be confidential, but Hoover routinely gave evidence from them to congressional committees such as HUAC.

The FBI engaged in a number of illegal practices in its pursuit of information on communists, including burglaries, opening mail, and illegal wiretaps. The members of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild (NLG) were among the few attorneys who were willing to defend clients in communist-related cases, and this made the NLG a particular target of Hoover's; the office of the NLG was burgled by the FBI at least 14 times between 1947 and 1951. Among other purposes, the FBI used its illegally obtained information to alert prosecuting attorneys about the planned legal strategies of NLG defense lawyers.

The FBI also used illegal undercover operations to disrupt communist and other dissident political groups. In 1956, Hoover was becoming increasingly frustrated by Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department's ability to prosecute communists. At this time, he formalized a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO actions included planting forged documents to create the suspicion that a key person was an FBI informer, spreading rumors through anonymous letters, leaking information to the press, calling for IRS audits, and the like. The COINTELPRO program remained in operation until 1971.

In March 1950, McCarthy had initiated a series of investigations into potential infiltration of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by communist agents and came up with a list of security risks that matched one previously compiled by the Agency itself. At the request of CIA director Allen Dulles, President Eisenhower demanded that McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA. Documents made public in 2004 revealed that the CIA, under Dulles' orders, had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and fed disinformation to him in order to discredit him and stop his investigation from proceeding any further.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (commonly referred to as the HUAC) was the most prominent and active government committee involved in anti-communist investigations. Formed in 1938 and known as the Dies Committee, named for Rep. Martin Dies, who chaired it until 1944, HUAC investigated a variety of "activities", including those of German-American Nazis during World War II. The committee soon focused on communism, beginning with an investigation into communists in the Federal Theatre Project in 1938. A significant step for HUAC was its investigation of the charges of espionage brought against Alger Hiss in 1948. This investigation ultimately resulted in Hiss's trial and conviction for perjury, and convinced many of the usefulness of congressional committees for uncovering communist subversion.

HUAC achieved its greatest fame and notoriety with its investigation into the Hollywood film industry. In October 1947, the committee began to subpoena screenwriters, directors, and other movie-industry professionals to testify about their known or suspected membership in the Communist Party, association with its members, or support of its beliefs. At these testimonies, this question was asked: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?" Among the first film industry witnesses subpoenaed by the committee were ten who decided not to cooperate. These men, who became known as the " Hollywood Ten", cited the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and free assembly, which they believed legally protected them from being required to answer the committee's questions. This tactic failed, and the ten were sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress. Two of them were sentenced to six months, the rest to a year.

In the future, witnesses (in the entertainment industries and otherwise) who were determined not to cooperate with the committee would claim their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. William Grooper and Rockwell Kent, the only two visual artists to be questioned by McCarthy, both took this approach, and emerged relatively unscathed by the experience. However, while this usually protected witnesses from a contempt-of-Congress citation, it was considered grounds for dismissal by many government and private-industry employers. The legal requirements for Fifth Amendment protection were such that a person could not testify about his own association with the Communist Party and then refuse to "name names" of colleagues with communist affiliations. Thus, many faced a choice between "crawl[ing] through the mud to be an informer," as actor Larry Parks put it, or becoming known as a "Fifth Amendment Communist"-an epithet often used by Senator McCarthy.

In the Senate, the primary committee for investigating communists was the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), formed in 1950 and charged with ensuring the enforcement of laws relating to "espionage, sabotage, and the protection of the internal security of the United States". The SISS was headed by Democrat Pat McCarran and gained a reputation for careful and extensive investigations. This committee spent a year investigating Owen Lattimore and other members of the Institute of Pacific Relations. As had been done numerous times before, the collection of scholars and diplomats associated with Lattimore (the so-called China Hands) were accused of "losing China", and while some evidence of pro-communist attitudes was found, nothing supported McCarran's accusation that Lattimore was "a conscious and articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy". Lattimore was charged with perjuring himself before the SISS in 1952. After many of the charges were rejected by a federal judge and one of the witnesses confessed to perjury, the case was dropped in 1955.

McCarthy headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953 and 1954, and during that time, used it for a number of his communist-hunting investigations. McCarthy first examined allegations of communist influence in the Voice of America, and then turned to the overseas library program of the State Department. Card catalogs of these libraries were searched for works by authors McCarthy deemed inappropriate. McCarthy then recited the list of supposedly pro-communist authors before his subcommittee and the press. Yielding to the pressure, the State Department ordered its overseas librarians to remove from their shelves "material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc." Some libraries actually burned the newly forbidden books. Though he did not block the State Department from carrying out this order, President Eisenhower publicly criticized the initiative as well, telling the graduating class of Dartmouth College President in 1953: "Don't join the book burners! ... Don't be afraid to go to the library and read every book so long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency-that should be the only censorship." The president then settled for a compromise by retaining the ban on Communist books written by Communists, while also allowing the libraries to keep books on Communism written by anti-Communists.

McCarthy next turned his attention to the case of a U.S. Army dentist who had been promoted to the rank of major despite having refused to answer questions on an Army loyalty review form. McCarthy's handling of this investigation, including a series of insults directed at a brigadier general, led to the Army-McCarthy hearings, with the Army and McCarthy trading charges and counter-charges for 36 days before a nationwide television audience. While the official outcome of the hearings was inconclusive, this exposure of McCarthy to the American public resulted in a sharp decline in his popularity. In less than a year, McCarthy was censured by the Senate, and his position as a prominent force in anti-communism was essentially ended.

On November 25, 1947, the day after the House of Representatives approved citations of contempt for the Hollywood Ten, Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, issued a press release on behalf of the heads of the major studios that came to be referred to as the Waldorf Statement. This statement announced the firing of the Hollywood Ten and stated: "We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States..." This marked the beginning of the Hollywood blacklist. In spite of the fact that hundreds were denied employment, the studios, producers, and other employers did not publicly admit that a blacklist existed.

At this time, private loyalty-review boards and anti-communist investigators began to appear to fill a growing demand among certain industries to certify that their employees were above reproach. Companies that were concerned about the sensitivity of their business, or which, like the entertainment industry, felt particularly vulnerable to public opinion, made use of these private services. For a fee, these teams investigated employees and questioned them about their politics and affiliations.

At such hearings, the subject usually did not have a right to the presence of an attorney, and as with HUAC, the interviewee might be asked to defend himself against accusations without being allowed to cross-examine the accuser. These agencies kept cross-referenced lists of leftist organizations, publications, rallies, charities, and the like, as well as lists of individuals who were known or suspected communists. Books such as Red Channels and newsletters such as Counterattack and Confidential Information were published to keep track of communist and leftist organizations and individuals. Insofar as the various blacklists of McCarthyism were actual physical lists, they were created and maintained by these private organizations.[citation needed ][further explanation needed ]

Efforts to protect the United States from the perceived threat of communist subversion were particularly enabled by several federal laws. The Hatch Act of 1939 banned membership in subversive organizations, which was interpreted as being anti-labor legislation. The Hatch Act would allow for the reduction of influence of the Workers' Alliance, which was claimed to have been created by the Soviet Union based on a model of their unemployed councils. The Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 made the act of "knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the ... desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association" a criminal offense.

Hundreds of communists and others were prosecuted under this law between 1941 and 1957. Eleven leaders of the Communist Party were convicted under the Smith Act in 1949 in the Foley Square trial. Ten defendants were given sentences of five years and the eleventh was sentenced to three years. The defense attorneys were cited for contempt of court and given prison sentences. In 1951, 23 other leaders of the party were indicted, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Many were convicted on the basis of testimony that was later admitted to be false. By 1957, 140 leaders and members of the Communist Party had been charged under the law, of whom 93 were convicted.

The McCarran Internal Security Act, which became law in 1950, has been described by scholar Ellen Schrecker as "the McCarthy era's only important piece of legislation" (the Smith Act technically antedated McCarthyism). However, the McCarran Act had no real effect beyond legal harassment. It required the registration of Communist organizations with the U.S. Attorney General and established the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate possible communist-action and communist-front organizations so they could be required to register. Due to numerous hearings, delays, and appeals, the act was never enforced, even with regard to the Communist Party of the United States itself, and the major provisions of the act were found to be unconstitutional in 1965 and 1967. In 1952, the Immigration and Nationality, or McCarran-Walter, Act was passed. This law allowed the government to deport immigrants or naturalized citizens engaged in subversive activities and also to bar suspected subversives from entering the country.

The Communist Control Act of 1954 was passed with overwhelming support in both houses of Congress after very little debate. Jointly drafted by Republican John Marshall Butler and Democrat Hubert Humphrey, the law was an extension of the Internal Security Act of 1950, and sought to outlaw the Communist Party by declaring that the party, as well as "Communist-Infiltrated Organizations" were "not entitled to any of the rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies." While the Communist Control Act had an odd mix of liberals and conservatives among its supporters, it never had any significant effect.

The act was successfully applied only twice. In 1954 it was used to prevent Communist Party members from appearing on the New Jersey state ballot, and in 1960, it was cited to deny the CPUSA recognition as an employer under New York state's unemployment compensation system. The New York Post called the act "a monstrosity", "a wretched repudiation of democratic principles," while accused Democratic liberals of a "neurotic, election-year anxiety to escape the charge of being 'soft on Communism' even at the expense of sacrificing constitutional rights."

In addition to the federal laws and responding to the worries of the local opinion, several states enacted anti-communist statutes.

By 1952, several states had enacted statutes against criminal anarchy, criminal syndicalism, and sedition; banned communists and "subversives" from public employment, or even from receiving public aid; demanded on loyalty oaths from public servants; and severely restricted or banned the Communist Party. In addition, six states had equivalents to the HUAC. The California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities and the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee were established by their respective legislatures.

Some of these states had very severe, or even extreme, laws against communism. In 1950, Michigan enacted life imprisonment for subversive propaganda; the following year, Tennessee enacted the death penalty for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. The death penalty for membership in the Communist Party was discussed in Texas by Governor Allan Shivers, who described it as "worse than murder."

Although right-wing radicals were the bedrock of support for McCarthyism, they were not alone. A broad "coalition of the aggrieved" found McCarthyism attractive, or at least politically useful. Common themes uniting the coalition were opposition to internationalism, particularly the United Nations; opposition to social welfare provisions, particularly the various programs established by the New Deal; and opposition to efforts to reduce inequalities in the social structure of the United States.

One focus of popular McCarthyism concerned the provision of public health services, particularly vaccination, mental health care services, and fluoridation, all of which were denounced by some to be communist plots to poison or brainwash the American people. Such viewpoints led to collisions between McCarthyite radicals and supporters of public-health programs, most notably in the case of the Alaska Mental Health Bill controversy of 1956.

William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the influential conservative political magazine National Review, wrote a defense of McCarthy, McCarthy and his Enemies, in which he asserted that "McCarthyism ... is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks."

In addition, as Richard Rovere points out, many ordinary Americans became convinced that there must be "no smoke without fire" and lent their support to McCarthyism. The Gallup poll found that at his peak in January 1954, 50% of the American public supported McCarthy, while 29% had an unfavorable opinion. His support fell to 34% in June 1954. Republicans tended to like what McCarthy was doing and Democrats did not, though McCarthy had significant support from traditional Democratic ethnic groups, especially Catholics, as well as many unskilled workers and small-business owners. (McCarthy himself was a Catholic.) He had very little support among union activists and Jews.

Those who sought to justify McCarthyism did so largely through their characterization of communism, and American communists in particular. Proponents of McCarthyism claimed that the CPUSA was so completely under Moscow's control that any American communist was a puppet of the Soviet intelligence services. This view, if restricted to the Communist Party's leadership is supported by recent documentation from the archives of the KGB as well as post-war decodes of wartime Soviet radio traffic from the Venona project, showing that Moscow provided financial support to the CPUSA and had significant influence on CPUSA policies. J. Edgar Hoover commented in a 1950 speech, "Communist members, body and soul, are the property of the Party."

According to historian Richard G. Powers, McCarthy added "bogus specificity" to "sweeping accusation[s]", gaining support among "countersubversive anticommunists" on one hand, who sought to find and punish perceived communists. On the other hand, "liberal anticommunists" believed that the Communist Party was "despicable and annoying" but ultimately politically irrelevant.

In addition, it was often claimed that the party didn't allow members to resign; thus someone who had been a member for a short time decades previously could be thought a current member. Many of the hearings and trials of McCarthyism featured testimony by former Communist Party members such as Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, and Whittaker Chambers, speaking as expert witnesses.

Various historians and pundits have discussed alleged Soviet-directed infiltration of the U.S. government and the possible collaboration of high U.S. government officials.

Estimating the number of victims of McCarthy is difficult. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.

For the vast majority, both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliation were tenuous. After the extremely damaging " Cambridge Five" spy scandal ( Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, et al.), suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. The hunt for "sexual perverts", who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in over 5,000 federal workers being fired, and thousands were harassed and denied employment. Many have termed this aspect of McCarthyism the " lavender scare".

Homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric disorder in the 1950s. However, in the context of the highly politicized Cold War environment, homosexuality became framed as a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a potential threat to state security. As the family was believed to be the cornerstone of American strength and integrity, the description of homosexuals as "sexual perverts" meant that they were both unable to function within a family unit and presented the potential to poison the social body. This era also witnessed the establishment of widely spread FBI surveillance intended to identify homosexual government employees.

The McCarthy hearings and according "sexual pervert" investigations can be seen to have been driven by a desire to identify individuals whose ability to function as loyal citizens had been compromised. McCarthy began his campaign by drawing upon the ways in which he embodied traditional American values to become the self-appointed vanguard of social morality.

Some of the notable people who were blacklisted or suffered some other persecution during McCarthyism include:

In 1953, Robert K. Murray, a young professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who had served as an intelligence officer in World War II, was revising his dissertation on the Red Scare of 1919-20 for publication until Little, Brown and Company decided that "under the circumstances ... it wasn't wise for them to bring this book out." He learned that investigators were questioning his colleagues and relatives. The University of Minnesota press published his volume, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920, in 1955.

The nation was by no means united behind the policies and activities that have come to be associated with McCarthyism. The critics of various aspects of McCarthyism included many figures not generally noted for their liberalism. In his overridden veto of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, President Truman wrote, "In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have." Truman also unsuccessfully vetoed the Taft-Hartley Act, which among other provisions denied trade unions National Labor Relations Board protection unless union leaders signed affidavits swearing they were not and had never been Communists. In 1953, after he left office, Truman criticized the current Eisenhower administration:

It is now evident that the present Administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism. I am not referring to the Senator from Wisconsin. He is only important in that his name has taken on the dictionary meaning of the word. It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the due process law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spreading of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of society.

On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican, delivered a speech to the Senate she called a " Declaration of Conscience". In a clear attack upon McCarthyism, she called for an end to " character assassinations" and named "some of the basic principles of Americanism: The right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought". She said " freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America", and decried "cancerous tentacles of 'know nothing, suspect everything' attitudes". Six other Republican senators- Wayne Morse, Irving M. Ives, Charles W. Tobey, Edward John Thye, George Aiken, and Robert C. Hendrickson -joined Smith in condemning the tactics of McCarthyism.

In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision in Adler v. Board of Education, thus approving a law that allowed state loyalty review boards to fire teachers deemed "subversive". In his dissenting opinion, Justice William O. Douglas wrote: "The present law proceeds on a principle repugnant to our society-guilt by association.... What happens under this law is typical of what happens in a police state. Teachers are under constant surveillance; their pasts are combed for signs of disloyalty; their utterances are watched for clues to dangerous thoughts."

One of the most influential opponents of McCarthyism was the famed CBS newscaster and analyst Edward R. Murrow. On October 20, 1953, Murrow's show aired an episode about the dismissal of Milo Radulovich, a former reserve Air Force lieutenant who was accused of associating with Communists. The show was strongly critical of the Air Force's methods, which included presenting evidence in a sealed envelope that Radulovich and his attorney were not allowed to open.

On March 9, 1954, See It Now aired another episode on the issue of McCarthyism, this one attacking Joseph McCarthy himself. Titled "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy", it used footage of McCarthy speeches to portray him as dishonest, reckless, and abusive toward witnesses and prominent Americans. In his concluding comment, Murrow said:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.

This broadcast has been cited as a key episode in bringing about the end of McCarthyism.

In the mid and late 1950s, the attitudes and institutions of McCarthyism slowly weakened. Changing public sentiments heavily contributed to the decline of McCarthyism. Its decline may also be charted through a series of court decisions.

With this court decision, the private blacklisters and those who used them were put on notice that they were legally liable for the professional and financial damage they caused. Although some informal blacklisting continued, the private "loyalty checking" agencies were soon a thing of the past. Even before the Faulk verdict, many in Hollywood had decided it was time to break the blacklist. In 1960, Dalton Trumbo, one of the best known members of the Hollywood Ten, was publicly credited with writing the films and .

Much of the undoing of McCarthyism came at the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. As Richard Rovere wrote in his biography of Joseph McCarthy, "[T]he United States Supreme Court took judicial notice of the rents McCarthy was making in the fabric of liberty and thereupon wrote a series of decisions that have made the fabric stronger than before." Two Eisenhower appointees to the court- Earl Warren (who was made Chief Justice) and William J. Brennan, Jr. -proved to be more liberal than Eisenhower had anticipated.

The Warren Court made a series of rulings that helped bring an end to the McCarthyism.

In 1956, the Warren Court heard the case of Slochower v. Board of Education. Harry Slochower was a professor at Brooklyn College who had been fired by New York City for invoking the Fifth Amendment when McCarthy's committee questioned him about his past membership in the Communist Party. The court prohibited such actions, ruling "...we must condemn the practice of imputing a sinister meaning to the exercise of a person's constitutional right under the Fifth Amendment... The privilege against self-incrimination would be reduced to a hollow mockery if its exercise could be taken as equivalent either to a confession of guilt or a conclusive presumption of perjury." In addition, the 1956 Cole v. Young ruling also greatly weakened the ability to discriminate in the federal civilian workforce.

Another key decision was in the 1957 case Yates v. United States, in which the convictions of fourteen Communists were reversed. In Justice Black's opinion, he wrote of the original "Smith Act" trials: "The testimony of witnesses is comparatively insignificant. Guilt or innocence may turn on what Marx or Engels or someone else wrote or advocated as much as a hundred years or more ago... When the propriety of obnoxious or unfamiliar view about government is in reality made the crucial issue, ...prejudice makes conviction inevitable except in the rarest circumstances."

Also in 1957, the Supreme Court ruled on the case of Watkins v. United States, curtailing the power of HUAC to punish uncooperative witnesses by finding them in contempt of Congress. Justice Warren wrote in the decision: "The mere summoning of a witness and compelling him to testify, against his will, about his beliefs, expressions or associations is a measure of governmental interference. And when those forced revelations concern matters that are unorthodox, unpopular, or even hateful to the general public, the reaction in the life of the witness may be disastrous."

In its 1958 decision in Kent v. Dulles, the Supreme Court halted the State Department from using the authority of its own regulations to refuse or revoke passports based on an applicant's communist beliefs or associations.

The political divisions McCarthyism created in the United States continue to make themselves manifest, and the politics and history of anti-communism in the United States are still contentious. Portions of the massive security apparatus established during the McCarthy era still exist. Loyalty oaths are still required by the California Constitution for all officials and employees of the government of California (which is highly problematic for Quakers and Jehovah's Witnesses whose beliefs preclude them from pledging absolute loyalty to the state). At the federal level, a few portions of the McCarran Internal Security Act remain in effect. However, the act's detention provision was repealed in 1971. The McCarran Act's Communist registration requirement was declared unconstitutional in the 1965 Supreme Court ruling in Albertson v. Subversive Activities Control Board as well. The McCarran Act's Subversive Activities Control Board, which enforced the law's investigation requirement for persons alleged to be involved in "subversive activities," was officially abolished through Congressional legislation in 1972 as well.

McCarthyism also attracts controversy purely as a historical issue. Through declassified documents from Soviet archives and Venona project decryptions of coded Soviet messages, the Soviet Union was found to have engaged in substantial espionage activities in the United States during the 1940s. The Communist Party USA also was substantially funded and its policies controlled by the Soviet Union, and accusations existed that CPUSA members were often recruited as spies.

Liberal anti-communists like Edward Shils and Daniel Moynihan had a contempt for McCarthyism. Sociologist Edward Shils criticized an excessive policy of secrecy during the Cold War, that led to the misdirection of McCarthyism, which was addressed during the 1994-1997 Moynihan Commission. As Moynihan put it, "reaction to McCarthy took the form of a modish anti-anti-Communism that considered impolite any discussion of the very real threat Communism posed to Western values and security." After revelations of Soviet spy networks from the declassified Venona project, Moynihan wondered: "Might less secrecy have prevented the liberal overreaction to McCarthyism as well as McCarthyism itself?" He described the situation during the McCarthy era as "ignorant armies clashed by night". With McCarthy advocating an extremist view, the discussion of communist subversion was made into a civil rights issue instead of a counterintelligence one.

In the view of some contemporary commentators, the revelations from Venona and other archives on espionage, stand as at least a partial vindication of McCarthyism. Some such as Goldberg feel that a genuinely dangerous subversive element was in the United States, and that this danger justified extreme measures. The opposing view holds that, recent revelations notwithstanding, by the time McCarthyism began in the late 1940s, the CPUSA was an ineffectual fringe group, and the damage done to U.S. interests by Soviet spies after World War II was minimal. Historian Ellen Schrecker states, " in this country, McCarthyism did more damage to the constitution than the American Communist Party ever did."

Historian John Earl Haynes, while acknowledging that inexcusable excesses occurred during McCarthyism, argues that some contemporary historians of McCarthyism underplay the un-democratic nature of the CPUSA. At the same time, Haynes, who studied the Venona decryptions extensively, argued that McCarthy's attempts to "make anti-communism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened [the post-War] anti-Communist consensus", thereby ultimately harming anti-Communist efforts more than helping them. Of the 159 people who were identified on lists used or referenced by McCarthy, evidence only substantially proved that nine of them had aided Soviet espionage efforts-while several hundred Soviet spies were actually known based on Venona and other evidence, most were never named by McCarthy.

A number of observers have compared the oppression of liberals and leftists during the McCarthy period to 2000s-era actions against suspected terrorists, most of them Muslims. In The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism, author Haynes Johnson compares the "abuses suffered by aliens thrown into high-security U.S. prisons in the wake of 9/11" to the excesses of the McCarthy era. Similarly, David D. Cole has written that the Patriot Act "in effect resurrects the philosophy of McCarthyism, simply substituting 'terrorist' for 'communist'."

From the opposite pole, conservative writer Ann Coulter devotes much of her book to drawing parallels between past opposition to McCarthy and McCarthyism and the policies and beliefs of modern-day liberals, arguing that the former hindered the anti-communist cause and the latter hinder the War on Terrorism. Other authors who have drawn on a comparison between current anti-terrorism policies and McCarthyism include Geoffrey R. Stone, Ted Morgan, and Jonah Goldberg.

Since the time of McCarthy, the word McCarthyism has entered American speech as a general term for a variety of practices: aggressively questioning a person's patriotism, making poorly supported accusations, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to adhere to conformist politics or to discredit an opponent, subverting civil and political rights in the name of national security, and the use of demagoguery are all often referred to as McCarthyism.

The 1951 novel The Troubled Air by Irwin Shaw tells the story of the director of a (fictional) radio show, broadcast live at the time, who is given a deadline to investigate his cast for alleged links to communism. The novel recounts the devastating effects on all concerned.

The 1952 Arthur Miller play The Crucible used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for McCarthyism, suggesting that the process of McCarthyism-style persecution can occur at any time or place. The play focused on the fact that once accused, a person had little chance of exoneration, given the irrational and circular reasoning of both the courts and the public. Miller later wrote: "The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties."

The 1976 film starring Woody Allen dealt with the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist. The film was made by those blacklisted: producer and director Martin Ritt; writer Walter Bernstein; and actors Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Michael Murphy, John Randolph, Lloyd Gough, and Joshua Shelley.

Guilty by Suspicion is a 1991 American drama film about the Hollywood blacklist, McCarthyism, and the activities of the HUAC. Written and directed by Irwin Winkler, it starred Robert De Niro, Annette Bening, and George Wendt.

The 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck by George Clooney starred David Strathairn as broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow and contained archival footage of McCarthy.

Haynes, John Earl. "The Cold War debate continues: A traditionalist view of historical writing on domestic Communism and anti-Communism." Journal of Cold War Studies 2.1 (2000): 76-115.

Hixson Jr, William B. Search for the American right wing: An analysis of the social science record, 1955-1987 (Princeton University Press, 2015).

Reeves, Thomas C. "McCarthyism: Interpretations since Hofstadter." Wisconsin Magazine of History (1976): 42-54. online

Selverstone, Marc J. "A Literature So Immense: The Historiography of Anticommunism." Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 24.4 (2010): 7-11.

Badash, Lawrence (October 30, 2007). "Science in the McCarthy Period: Training Ground for Scientists as Public Citizens". Oregon State University. Archived from the original on February 5, 2008.

Beyer, Mary & Michael Beyer (January 2006). "McCarthyism Today". International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Archived from the original on October 1, 2006.

"McCarthyism / The "Red Scare"". Dwight D. Eisenhower Online Documents. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home. Archived from the original on November 1, 2013.

Rusher, William A. (Fall 2004). "A Closer Look Under The Bed". Claremont Review of Books. Claremont Institute. Archived from the original on January 27, 2012.

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McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to anarchism, communism, and socialism, and especially when the accusations are false or unproven and are made in a public and attention-grabbing manner. The term originally referred to the controversial practices and policies of U.S.

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The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, died under torture after refusing to enter a plea, and at least five people died in jail.

Arrests were made in numerous towns beyond Salem and Salem Village (known today as Danvers), notably Andover and Topsfield. The grand juries and trials for this capital crime were conducted by a Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 and by a Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, both held in Salem Town, where the hangings also took place. It was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America. Fourteen other women and two men were executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 18th century.

The episode is one of colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It was not unique, but a colonial manifestation of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials in the early modern period, which took the lives of tens of thousands, mainly in Protestant Europe and the Americas. In America, Salem's events have been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolation, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process. Many historians consider the lasting effects of the trials to have been highly influential in the history of the United States. According to historian George Lincoln Burr, "the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered."

At the 300th anniversary events in 1992 to commemorate the victims of the trials, a park was dedicated in Salem and a memorial in Danvers. In 1957, an act passed by the Massachusetts legislature absolved six people, while another one, passed in 2001, absolved five other victims. As of 2004, there was still talk about exonerating all of the victims, though some think that happened in the 18th century as the Massachusetts colonial legislature was asked to reverse the attainders of "George Burroughs and others". In January 2016, the University of Virginia announced its Gallows Hill Project team had determined the execution site in Salem, where the 19 "witches" had been hanged. The city dedicated the Proctor's Ledge Memorial to the victims there in 2017.

Background

While witch trials had begun to fade out across much of Europe by the mid-17th century, they continued on the fringes of Europe and in the American Colonies. The events in 1692-1693 in Salem became a brief outburst of a sort of hysteria in the New World, while the practice was already waning in most of Europe.

In 1668, in Against Modern Sadducism, Joseph Glanvill claimed that he could prove the existence of witches and ghosts of the supernatural realm. Glanvill wrote about the "denial of the bodily resurrection, and the [supernatural] spirits."

In his treatise, Glanvill claimed that ingenious men should believe in witches and apparitions; if they doubted the reality of spirits, they not only denied demons but also the almighty God. Glanvill wanted to prove that the supernatural could not be denied; those who did deny apparitions were considered heretics, for it also disproved their beliefs in angels. Works by men such as Glanvill and Cotton Mather tried to prove that "demons were alive."

Accusations

Recorded witchcraft executions in New England

The earliest recorded witchcraft execution was that of Alse Young in 1647 in Hartford, Connecticut, the start of the Connecticut Witch Trials which lasted until 1663. Historian Clarence F. Jewett included a list of other people executed in New England in his 1881 book.

Political context

New England had been settled by religious dissenters seeking to build a Bible-based society according to their own chosen discipline. The original 1629 Royal Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was vacated in 1684, after which King James II installed Sir Edmund Andros as the governor of the Dominion of New England. Andros was ousted in 1689 after the " Glorious Revolution" in England replaced the Catholic James II with the Protestant co-rulers William and Mary.

Simon Bradstreet and Thomas Danforth, the colony's last leaders under the old charter, resumed their posts as governor and deputy governor, but lacked constitutional authority to rule because the old charter had been vacated. At the same time, tensions erupted between English colonists settling in "the Eastward" (the present-day coast of Maine) and French-supported Wabanaki people of that territory in what came to be known as King William's War. This was 13 years after the devastating King Philip's War with the Wampanoag and other indigenous tribes in southern and western New England. In October 1690, Sir William Phips led an unsuccessful attack on French-held Quebec. Between 1689 and 1692, Native Americans continued to attack many English settlements along the Maine coast, leading to the abandonment of some of the settlements and resulting in a flood of refugees into areas like Essex County.

Portrait of Increase Mather, 1688, by Joan van der Spriet

A new charter for the enlarged Province of Massachusetts Bay was given final approval in England on October 16, 1691. Increase Mather had been working on obtaining the charter for four years, with William Phips often joining him in London and helping him gain entry to Whitehall. Increase Mather had published a book on witchcraft in 1684 and his son Cotton Mather published one in 1689. Increase Mather brought out a London edition of his son's book in 1690. Increase Mather claimed to have picked all the men to be included in the new government. News of Mather's charter and the appointment of Phips as the new governor had reached Boston by late January, and a copy of the new charter reached Boston on February 8, 1692. Phips arrived in Boston on May 14 and was sworn in as governor two days later, along with Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton. One of the first orders of business for the new governor and council on May 27, 1692, was the formal nomination of county justices of the peace, sheriffs, and the commission of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle the large numbers of people who were "thronging" the jails.

Local context

Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts) was known for its fractious population, who had many disputes internally and with Salem Town (present-day Salem). Arguments about property lines, grazing rights, and church privileges were rife, and neighbors considered the population as "quarrelsome." In 1672, the villagers had voted to hire a minister of their own, apart from Salem Town. The first two ministers, James Bayley (1673-1679) and George Burroughs (1680-1683), stayed only a few years each, departing after the congregation failed to pay their full rate. (Burroughs was subsequently arrested at the height of the witchcraft hysteria and was hanged as a witch in August 1692.)

Despite the ministers' rights being upheld by the General Court and the parish being admonished, each of the two ministers still chose to leave. The third minister, Deodat Lawson (1684-1688), stayed for a short time, leaving after the church in Salem refused to ordain him-and therefore not over issues with the congregation. The parish disagreed about Salem Village's choice of Samuel Parris as its first ordained minister. On June 18, 1689, the villagers agreed to hire Parris for £66 annually, "one third part in money and the other two third parts in provisions," and use of the parsonage.

Though the prior ministers' fates and the level of contention in Salem Village were valid reasons for caution in accepting the position, Rev. Parris increased the village's divisions by delaying his acceptance. He did not seem able to settle his new parishioners' disputes: by deliberately seeking out "iniquitous behavior" in his congregation and making church members in good standing suffer public penance for small infractions, he contributed significantly to the tension within the village. Its bickering increased unabated. Historian Marion Starkey suggests that, in this atmosphere, serious conflict may have been inevitable.

Religious context

Prior to the constitutional turmoil of the 1680s, the Massachusetts government had been dominated by conservative Puritan leaders. While Puritans and the Church of England both shared a common influence in Calvinism, Puritans had opposed many of the traditions of the Church of England, including use of the Book of Common Prayer, the use of clergy vestments during services, the use of the sign of the cross at baptism, and kneeling to receive communion, all of which they believed constituted popery. King Charles I was hostile to this viewpoint, and Anglican church officials tried to repress these dissenting views during the 1620s and 1630s. Some Puritans and other religious minorities had sought refuge in the Netherlands but ultimately many made a major migration to colonial North America to establish their own society.

These immigrants, who were mostly constituted of families, established several of the earliest colonies in New England, of which the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the largest and most economically important. They intended to build a society based on their religious beliefs. Colonial leaders were elected by the freemen of the colony, those individuals who had had their religious experiences formally examined and had been admitted to one of the colony's Puritan congregations. The colonial leadership were prominent members of their congregations and regularly consulted with the local ministers on issues facing the colony.

In the early 1640s, England erupted in civil war. The Puritan-dominated Parliamentarians emerged victorious, and the Crown was supplanted by the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell in 1653. Its failure led to restoration of the old order under Charles II. Emigration to New England slowed significantly in these years. In Massachusetts, a successful merchant class began to develop that was less religiously motivated than the colony's early settlers.

Gender context

A majority of people accused and convicted of witchcraft were women (about 78%). Overall, the Puritan belief and prevailing New England culture was that women were inherently sinful and more susceptible to damnation than men were. Throughout their daily lives, Puritans, especially Puritan women, actively attempted to thwart attempts by the Devil to overtake them and their souls. Indeed, Puritans held the belief that men and women were equal in the eyes of God, but not in the eyes of the Devil. Women's souls were seen as unprotected in their so-called "weak and vulnerable bodies". Several factors may explain why women were more likely to admit guilt of witchcraft than men. Historian Elizabeth Reis asserts that some likely believed they had truly given in to the Devil, and others might have believed they had done so temporarily. However, because those who confessed were reintegrated into society, some women might have confessed in order to spare their own lives.

Quarrels with neighbors often incited witchcraft allegations. One example of this is Abigail Faulkner, who was accused in 1692. Faulkner admitted she was "angry at what folk said," and the Devil may have temporarily overtaken her, causing harm to her neighbors. Women who did not conform to the norms of Puritan society were more likely to be the target of an accusation, especially those who were unmarried or did not have children.

Publicising witchcraft

Cotton Mather, a minister of Boston's North Church, was a prolific publisher of pamphlets, including some that expressed his belief in witchcraft. In his book Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689), Mather describes his "oracular observations" and how "stupendous witchcraft" had affected the children of Boston mason John Goodwin.

Mather illustrates how the Goodwins' eldest child had been tempted by the devil and had stolen linen from the washerwoman Goody Glover. Glover, of Irish Catholic descent, was characterized as a disagreeable old woman and described by her husband as a witch; this may have been why she was accused of casting spells on the Goodwin children. After the event, four out of six Goodwin children began to have strange fits, or what some people referred to as "the disease of astonishment." The manifestations attributed to the disease quickly became associated with witchcraft. Symptoms included neck and back pains, tongues being drawn from their throats, and loud random outcries; other symptoms included having no control over their bodies such as becoming limber, flapping their arms like birds, or trying to harm others as well as themselves. These symptoms fueled the craze of 1692.

Initial events

In Salem Village in February 1692, Betty Parris (age 9) and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11), the daughter and the niece, respectively, of Reverend Samuel Parris, began to have fits described as "beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect" by John Hale, the minister of the nearby town of Beverly. The girls screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions, according to the eyewitness account of Reverend Deodat Lawson, a former minister in Salem Village.

The girls complained of being pinched and pricked with pins. A doctor, historically assumed to be William Griggs, could find no physical evidence of any ailment. Other young women in the village began to exhibit similar behaviors. When Lawson preached as a guest in the Salem Village meetinghouse, he was interrupted several times by the outbursts of the afflicted.

The first three people accused and arrested for allegedly afflicting Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, 12-year-old Ann Putnam, Jr., and Elizabeth Hubbard, were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. Some historians believe that the accusation by Ann Putnam Jr. suggests that a family feud may have been a major cause of the witch trials. At the time, a vicious rivalry was underway between the Putnam and Porter families, one which deeply polarized the people of Salem. Citizens would often have heated debates, which escalated into full-fledged fighting, based solely on their opinion of the feud. Some of the physical symptoms resembled convulsive ergot poisoning, proposed 284 years later.

Sarah Good was a destitute woman accused of witchcraft because of her reputation. At her trial, she was accused of rejecting Puritan ideals of self-control and discipline when she chose to torment and "scorn [children] instead of leading them towards the path of salvation".

Sarah Osborne rarely attended church meetings. She was accused of witchcraft because the Puritans believed that Osborne had her own self-interests in mind following her remarriage to an indentured servant. The citizens of the town disapproved of her trying to control her son's inheritance from her previous marriage.

Tituba, an enslaved South American Kalina woman from the West Indies, likely became a target because of her ethnic differences from most of the other villagers. She was accused of attracting girls like Abigail Williams and Betty Parris with stories of enchantment from Malleus Maleficarum. These tales about sexual encounters with demons, swaying the minds of men, and fortune-telling were said to stimulate the imaginations of girls and made Tituba an obvious target of accusations. Each of these women was a kind of outcast and exhibited many of the character traits typical of the "usual suspects" for witchcraft accusations; they were left to defend themselves. Brought before the local magistrates on the complaint of witchcraft, they were interrogated for several days, starting on March 1, 1692, then sent to jail.

In March, others were accused of witchcraft: Martha Corey, child Dorothy Good, and Rebecca Nurse in Salem Village, and Rachel Clinton in nearby Ipswich. Martha Corey had expressed skepticism about the credibility of the girls' accusations and thus drawn attention. The charges against her and Rebecca Nurse deeply troubled the community because Martha Corey was a full covenanted member of the Church in Salem Village, as was Rebecca Nurse in the Church in Salem Town. If such upstanding people could be witches, the townspeople thought, then anybody could be a witch, and church membership was no protection from accusation. Dorothy Good, the daughter of Sarah Good, was only four years old but was not exempted from questioning by the magistrates; her answers were construed as a confession that implicated her mother. In Ipswich, Rachel Clinton was arrested for witchcraft at the end of March on independent charges unrelated to the afflictions of the girls in Salem Village.

The initial examinations included physical exams where the accused were examined for unique markings such as moles, birth marks that were commonly believed to be associated with the Devil's influence. It was thought that those markings represented the Devil drinking the accused women's blood.

Accusations and examinations before local magistrates

When Sarah Cloyce (Nurse's sister) and Elizabeth (Bassett) Proctor were arrested in April, they were brought before John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin at a meeting in Salem Town. The men were both local magistrates and also members of the Governor's Council. Present for the examination were Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, and Assistants Samuel Sewall, Samuel Appleton, James Russell and Isaac Addington. During the proceedings, objections by Elizabeth's husband, John Proctor, resulted in his arrest that day.

Within a week, Giles Corey (Martha's husband and a covenanted church member in Salem Town), Abigail Hobbs, Bridget Bishop, Mary Warren (a servant in the Proctor household and sometime accuser), and Deliverance Hobbs (stepmother of Abigail Hobbs), were arrested and examined. Abigail Hobbs, Mary Warren, and Deliverance Hobbs all confessed and began naming additional people as accomplices. More arrests followed: Sarah Wildes, William Hobbs (husband of Deliverance and father of Abigail), Nehemiah Abbott Jr., Mary Eastey (sister of Cloyce and Nurse), Edward Bishop Jr. and his wife Sarah Bishop, and Mary English.

On April 30, Reverend George Burroughs, Lydia Dustin, Susannah Martin, Dorcas Hoar, Sarah Morey, and Philip English (Mary's husband) were arrested. Nehemiah Abbott Jr. was released because the accusers agreed he was not the person whose specter had afflicted them. Mary Eastey was released for a few days after her initial arrest because the accusers failed to confirm that it was she who had afflicted them; she was arrested again when the accusers reconsidered. In May, accusations continued to pour in, but some of the suspects began to evade apprehension. Multiple warrants were issued before John Willard and Elizabeth Colson were apprehended; George Jacobs Jr. and Daniel Andrews were not caught. Until this point, all the proceedings were investigative, but on May 27, 1692, William Phips ordered the establishment of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer for Suffolk, Essex and Middlesex counties to prosecute the cases of those in jail. Warrants were issued for more people. Sarah Osborne, one of the first three persons accused, died in jail on May 10, 1692.

Warrants were issued for 36 more people, with examinations continuing to take place in Salem Village: Sarah Dustin (daughter of Lydia Dustin), Ann Sears, Bethiah Carter Sr. and her daughter Bethiah Carter Jr., George Jacobs Sr. and his granddaughter Margaret Jacobs, John Willard, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Abigail Soames, George Jacobs Jr. (son of George Jacobs Sr. and father of Margaret Jacobs), Daniel Andrew, Rebecca Jacobs (wife of George Jacobs Jr. and sister of Daniel Andrew), Sarah Buckley and her daughter Mary Witheridge.

Also included were Elizabeth Colson, Elizabeth Hart, Thomas Farrar Sr. Roger Toothaker, Sarah Proctor (daughter of John and Elizabeth Proctor), Sarah Bassett (sister-in-law of Elizabeth Proctor), Susannah Roots, Mary DeRich (another sister-in-law of Elizabeth Proctor), Sarah Pease, Elizabeth Cary, Martha Carrier, Elizabeth Fosdick, Wilmot Redd, Sarah Rice, Elizabeth Howe, Capt. John Alden (son of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins), William Proctor (son of John and Elizabeth Proctor), John Flood, Mary Toothaker (wife of Roger Toothaker and sister of Martha Carrier) and her daughter Margaret Toothaker, and Arthur Abbott. When the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened at the end of May, the total number of people in custody was 62.

Cotton Mather wrote to one of the judges, John Richards, a member of his congregation, on May 31, 1692, expressing his support of the prosecutions, but cautioning him:

[D]o not lay more stress on pure spectral evidence than it will bear ... It is very certain that the Devils have sometimes represented the Shapes of persons not only innocent, but also very virtuous. Though I believe that the just God then ordinarily provides a way for the speedy vindication of the persons thus abused.

Formal prosecution: The Court of Oyer and Terminer

The Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem Town on June 2, 1692, with William Stoughton, the new Lieutenant Governor, as Chief Magistrate, Thomas Newton as the Crown's Attorney prosecuting the cases, and Stephen Sewall as clerk. Bridget Bishop's case was the first brought to the grand jury, who endorsed all the indictments against her. Bishop was described as not living a Puritan lifestyle, for she wore black clothing and odd costumes, which was against the Puritan code. When she was examined before her trial, Bishop was asked about her coat, which had been awkwardly "cut or torn in two ways".

This, along with her "immoral" lifestyle, affirmed to the jury that Bishop was a witch. She went to trial the same day and was convicted. On June 3, the grand jury endorsed indictments against Rebecca Nurse and John Willard, but they did not go to trial immediately, for reasons which are unclear. Bishop was executed by hanging on June 10, 1692.

1. The afflicted state of our poor neighbours, that are now suffering by molestations from the invisible world, we apprehend so deplorable, that we think their condition calls for the utmost help of all persons in their several capacities.

2. We cannot but, with all thankfulness, acknowledge the success which the merciful God has given unto the sedulous and assiduous endeavours of our honourable rulers, to detect the abominable witchcrafts which have been committed in the country, humbly praying, that the discovery of those mysterious and mischievous wickednesses may be perfected.

3. We judge that, in the prosecution of these and all such witchcrafts, there is need of a very critical and exquisite caution, lest by too much credulity for things received only upon the Devil's authority, there be a door opened for a long train of miserable consequences, and Satan get an advantage over us; for we should not be ignorant of his devices.

4. As in complaints upon witchcrafts, there may be matters of inquiry which do not amount unto matters of presumption, and there may be matters of presumption which yet may not be matters of conviction, so it is necessary, that all proceedings thereabout be managed with an exceeding tenderness towards those that may be complained of, especially if they have been persons formerly of an unblemished reputation.

5. When the first inquiry is made into the circumstances of such as may lie under the just suspicion of witchcrafts, we could wish that there may be admitted as little as is possible of such noise, company and openness as may too hastily expose them that are examined, and that there may no thing be used as a test for the trial of the suspected, the lawfulness whereof may be doubted among the people of God; but that the directions given by such judicious writers as Perkins and Bernard [be consulted in such a case].

6. Presumptions whereupon persons may be committed, and, much more, convictions whereupon persons may be condemned as guilty of witchcrafts, ought certainly to be more considerable than barely the accused person's being represented by a specter unto the afflicted; inasmuch as it is an undoubted and notorious thing, that a demon may, by God's permission, appear, even to ill purposes, in the shape of an innocent, yea, and a virtuous man. Nor can we esteem alterations made in the sufferers, by a look or touch of the accused, to be an infallible evidence of guilt, but frequently liable to be abused by the Devil's legerdemains.

7. We know not whether some remarkable affronts given to the Devils by our disbelieving those testimonies whose whole force and strength is from them alone, may not put a period unto the progress of the dreadful calamity begun upon us, in the accusations of so many persons, whereof some, we hope, are yet clear from the great transgression laid unto their charge.

8. Nevertheless, we cannot but humbly recommend unto the government, the speedy and vigorous prosecution of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of God, and the wholesome statutes of the English nation, for the detection of witchcrafts.

Thomas Hutchinson sums the letter, "The two first and the last sections of this advice took away the force of all the others, and the prosecutions went on with more vigor than before." (Reprinting the letter years later in Magnalia, Cotton Mather left out these "two first and the last" sections.) Major Nathaniel Saltonstall, Esq., resigned from the court on or about June 16, presumably dissatisfied with the letter and that it had not outright barred the admission of spectral evidence. According to Upham, Saltonstall deserves the credit for "being the only public man of his day who had the sense or courage to condemn the proceedings, at the start." (chapt. VII) More people were accused, arrested and examined, but now in Salem Town, by former local magistrates John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and Bartholomew Gedney, who had become judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Suspect Roger Toothaker died in prison on June 16, 1692.

From June 30 through early July, grand juries endorsed indictments against Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Proctor, John Proctor, Martha Carrier, Sarah Wildes and Dorcas Hoar. Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin and Sarah Wildes, along with Rebecca Nurse, went to trial at this time, where they were found guilty. All five women were executed by hanging on July 19, 1692. In mid-July, the constable in Andover invited the afflicted girls from Salem Village to visit with his wife to try to determine who was causing her afflictions. Ann Foster, her daughter Mary Lacey Sr., and granddaughter Mary Lacey Jr. all confessed to being witches. Anthony Checkley was appointed by Governor Phips to replace Thomas Newton as the Crown's Attorney when Newton took an appointment in New Hampshire.

In August, grand juries indicted George Burroughs, Mary Eastey, Martha Corey and George Jacobs Sr. Trial juries convicted Martha Carrier, George Jacobs Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard, Elizabeth Proctor, and John Proctor. Elizabeth Proctor was given a temporary stay of execution because she was pregnant. On August 19, 1692, Martha Carrier, George Jacobs Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard, and John Proctor were executed:

Mr. Burroughs was carried in a Cart with others, through the streets of Salem, to Execution. When he was upon the Ladder, he made a speech for the clearing of his Innocency, with such Solemn and Serious Expressions as were to the Admiration of all present; his Prayer (which he concluded by repeating the Lord's Prayer) [as witches were not supposed to be able to recite] was so well worded, and uttered with such composedness as such fervency of spirit, as was very Affecting, and drew Tears from many, so that if seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the execution. The accusers said the black Man [Devil] stood and dictated to him. As soon as he was turned off [hanged], Mr. Cotton Mather, being mounted upon a Horse, addressed himself to the People, partly to declare that he [Mr. Burroughs] was no ordained Minister, partly to possess the People of his guilt, saying that the devil often had been transformed into the Angel of Light. And this did somewhat appease the People, and the Executions went on; when he [Mr. Burroughs] was cut down, he was dragged by a Halter to a Hole, or Grave, between the Rocks, about two feet deep; his Shirt and Breeches being pulled off, and an old pair of Trousers of one Executed put on his lower parts: he was so put in, together with Willard and Carrier, that one of his Hands, and his Chin, and a Foot of one of them, was left uncovered.

September 1692

Examination of a Witch (1853) by T. H. Matteson, inspired by the Salem trials

In September, grand juries indicted 18 more people. The grand jury failed to indict William Proctor, who was re-arrested on new charges. On September 19, 1692, Giles Corey refused to plead at trial, and was killed by peine forte et dure, a form of torture in which the subject is pressed beneath an increasingly heavy load of stones, in an attempt to make him enter a plea. Four pleaded guilty and 11 others were tried and found guilty.

On September 20, Cotton Mather wrote to Stephen Sewall: "That I may be the more capable to assist in lifting up a standard against the infernal enemy", requesting "a narrative of the evidence given in at the trials of half a dozen, or if you please, a dozen, of the principal witches that have been condemned." On September 22, 1692, eight more persons were executed, "After Execution Mr. Noyes turning him to the Bodies, said, what a sad thing it is to see Eight Firebrands of Hell hanging there."

Dorcas Hoar was given a temporary reprieve, with the support of several ministers, to make a confession of being a witch. Mary Bradbury (aged 77) managed to escape with the help of family and friends. Abigail Faulkner Sr. was pregnant and given a temporary reprieve (some reports from that era say that Abigail's reprieve later became a stay of charges).

Mather quickly completed his account of the trials, Wonders of the Invisible World and it was given to Phips when he returned from the fighting in Maine in early October. Burr says both Phips' letter and Mather's manuscript "must have gone to London by the same ship" in mid-October:

I hereby declare that as soon as I came from fighting ... and understood what danger some of their innocent subjects might be exposed to, if the evidence of the afflicted persons only did prevaile either to the committing or trying any of them, I did before any application was made unto me about it put a stop to the proceedings of the Court and they are now stopt till their Majesties pleasure be known.

-  Governor Phips, Boston, October 12, 1692

On October 29, Judge Sewall wrote, "the Court of Oyer and Terminer count themselves thereby dismissed ... asked whether the Court of Oyer and Terminer should sit, expressing some fear of Inconvenience by its fall, [the] Governour said it must fall". Perhaps by coincidence, Governor Phips' own wife, Lady Mary Phips, was among those who had been "called out upon" around this time. After Phips' order, there were no more executions.

Superior Court of Judicature, 1693

When Stoughton wrote the warrants for the execution of these three and others remaining from the previous court, Governor Phips issued pardons, sparing their lives. In late January/early February, the Court sat again in Charlestown, Middlesex County, and held grand juries and tried five people: Sarah Cole (of Lynn), Lydia Dustin and Sarah Dustin, Mary Taylor and Mary Toothaker. All were found not guilty but were not released until they paid their jail fees. Lydia Dustin died in jail on March 10, 1693.

At the end of April, the Court convened in Boston, Suffolk County, and cleared Capt. John Alden by proclamation. It heard charges against a servant girl, Mary Watkins, for falsely accusing her mistress of witchcraft. In May, the Court convened in Ipswich, Essex County, and held a variety of grand juries. They dismissed charges against all but five people. Susannah Post, Eunice Frye, Mary Bridges Jr., Mary Barker and William Barker Jr. were all found not guilty at trial, finally putting an end to the series of trials and executions.

Legal procedures

After someone concluded that a loss, illness, or death had been caused by witchcraft, the accuser entered a complaint against the alleged witch with the local magistrates. If the complaint was deemed credible, the magistrates had the person arrested and brought in for a public examination-essentially an interrogation where the magistrates pressed the accused to confess.

If the magistrates at this local level were satisfied that the complaint was well-founded, the prisoner was handed over to be dealt with by a superior court. In 1692, the magistrates opted to wait for the arrival of the new charter and governor, who would establish a Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle these cases. The next step, at the superior court level, was to summon witnesses before a grand jury.

Several others, including Elizabeth (Bassett) Proctor and Abigail Faulkner, were convicted but given temporary reprieves because they were pregnant. Five other women were convicted in 1692, but the death sentence was never carried out: Mary Bradbury (in absentia), Ann Foster (who later died in prison), Mary Lacey Sr. (Foster's daughter), Dorcas Hoar and Abigail Hobbs.

Giles Corey, an 81-year-old farmer from the southeast end of Salem (called Salem Farms), refused to enter a plea when he came to trial in September. The judges applied an archaic form of punishment called peine forte et dure, in which stones were piled on his chest until he could no longer breathe. After two days of peine fort et dure, Corey died without entering a plea. His refusal to plead is usually explained as a way of preventing his estate from being confiscated by the Crown, but, according to historian Chadwick Hansen, much of Corey's property had already been seized, and he had made a will in prison: "His death was a protest ... against the methods of the court". A contemporary critic of the trials, Robert Calef, wrote, "Giles Corey pleaded not Guilty to his Indictment, but would not put himself upon Tryal by the Jury (they having cleared none upon Tryal) and knowing there would be the same Witnesses against him, rather chose to undergo what Death they would put him to."

As convicted witches, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey had been excommunicated from their churches and denied proper burials. As soon as the bodies of the accused were cut down from the trees, they were thrown into a shallow grave, and the crowd dispersed. Oral history claims that the families of the dead reclaimed their bodies after dark and buried them in unmarked graves on family property. The record books of the time do not note the deaths of any of those executed.

Spectral evidence

Title page of Cases of Conscience (Boston, 1693) by Increase Mather

Much, but not all, of the evidence used against the accused was spectral evidence, or the testimony of the afflicted who claimed to see the apparition or the shape of the person who was allegedly afflicting them. The theological dispute that ensued about the use of this evidence was based on whether a person had to give permission to the Devil for his/her shape to be used to afflict. Opponents claimed that the Devil was able to use anyone's shape to afflict people, but the Court contended that the Devil could not use a person's shape without that person's permission; therefore, when the afflicted claimed to see the apparition of a specific person, that was accepted as evidence that the accused had been complicit with the Devil.

Cotton Mather's The Wonders of the Invisible World was written with the purpose to show how careful the court was in managing the trials. Unfortunately the work did not get released until after the trials had already ended. In his book, Mather explained how he felt spectral evidence was presumptive and that it alone was not enough to warrant a conviction. Robert Calef, a strong critic of Cotton Mather, stated in his own book titled More Wonders of the Invisible World that by confessing, an accused would not be brought to trial, such as in the cases of Tituba and Dorcas Good.

Increase Mather and other ministers sent a letter to the Court, "The Return of Several Ministers Consulted", urging the magistrates not to convict on spectral evidence alone. (The court later ruled that spectral evidence was inadmissible, which caused a dramatic reduction in the rate of convictions and may have hastened the end of the trials.) A copy of this letter was printed in Increase Mather's Cases of Conscience, published in 1693. The publication A Tryal of Witches, related to the 1662 Bury St Edmunds witch trial, was used by the magistrates at Salem when looking for a precedent in allowing spectral evidence. Since the jurist Sir Matthew Hale had permitted this evidence, supported by the eminent philosopher, physician and author Thomas Browne, to be used in the Bury St Edmunds witch trial and the accusations against two Lowestoft women, the colonial magistrates also accepted its validity and their trials proceeded.

According to a March 27, 1692 entry by Parris in the Records of the Salem-Village Church, a church member and close neighbor of Rev. Parris, Mary Sibley (aunt of Mary Walcott), directed John Indian, a man enslaved by Parris, to make a witch cake. This may have been a superstitious attempt to ward off evil spirits. According to an account attributed to Deodat Lawson ("collected by Deodat Lawson") this happened around March 8, over a week after the first complaints had gone out and three women were arrested. Lawson's account describes this cake "a means to discover witchcraft" and provides other details such as that it was made from rye meal and urine from the afflicted girls and was fed to a dog.

In the Church Records, Parris describes speaking with Sibley privately on March 25, 1692, about her "grand error" and accepted her "sorrowful confession." After the main sermon on March 27, and the wider congregation was dismissed, Parris addressed covenanted church-members about it and admonished all the congregation against "going to the Devil for help against the Devil." He stated that while "calamities" that had begun in his own household "it never brake forth to any considerable light, until diabolical means were used, by the making of a cake by my Indian man, who had his direction from this our sister, Mary Sibley." This doesn't seem to square with Lawson's account dating it around March 8. The first complaints were February 29 and the first arrests were March 1.

This 19th-century representation of "Tituba and the Children" by Alfred Fredericks, originally appeared in A Popular History of the United States, Vol. 2, by William Cullen Bryant (1878)

Traditionally, the allegedly afflicted girls are said to have been entertained by Parris' slave, Tituba. A variety of secondary sources, starting with Charles W. Upham in the 19th century, typically relate that a circle of the girls, with Tituba's help, tried their hands at fortune telling. They used the white of an egg and a mirror to create a primitive crystal ball to divine the professions of their future spouses and scared one another when one supposedly saw the shape of a coffin instead. The story is drawn from John Hale's book about the trials, but in his account, only one of the girls, not a group of them, had confessed to him afterward that she had once tried this. Hale did not mention Tituba as having any part of it, nor did he identify when the incident took place. But the record of Tituba's pre-trial examination holds her giving an energetic confession, speaking before the court of "creatures who inhabit the invisible world," and "the dark rituals which bind them together in service of Satan", implicating both Good and Osborne while asserting that "many other people in the colony were engaged in the devil's conspiracy against the Bay."

Tituba's race has often been described in later accounts as of Carib-Indian or African descent, but contemporary sources describe her only as an "Indian". Research by Elaine Breslaw has suggested that Tituba may have been captured in what is now Venezuela and brought to Barbados, and so may have been an Arawak Indian. Other slightly later descriptions of her, by Gov. Thomas Hutchinson writing his history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 18th century, describe her as a "Spanish Indian." In that day, that typically meant a Native American from the Carolinas/ Georgia/ Florida.

The most infamous application of the belief in effluvia was the touch test used in Andover during preliminary examinations in September 1692. Parris had explicitly warned his congregation against such examinations. If the accused witch touched the victim while the victim was having a fit, and the fit stopped, observers believed that meant the accused was the person who had afflicted the victim. As several of those accused later recounted:

...we were blindfolded, and our hands were laid upon the afflicted persons, they being in their fits and falling into their fits at our coming into their presence, as they said. Some led us and laid our hands upon them, and then they said they were well and that we were guilty of afflicting them; whereupon we were all seized, as prisoners, by a warrant from the justice of the peace and forthwith carried to Salem.

The Rev. John Hale explained how this supposedly worked: "the Witch by the cast of her eye sends forth a Malefick Venome into the Bewitched to cast him into a fit, and therefore the touch of the hand doth by sympathy cause that venome to return into the Body of the Witch again".

Other evidence

Other evidence included the confessions of the accused; testimony by a confessed witch who identified others as witches; the discovery of poppits (), books of palmistry and horoscopes, or pots of ointments in the possession or home of the accused; and observation of what were called witch's teats on the body of the accused. A witch's teat was said to be a mole or blemish somewhere on the body that was insensitive to touch; discovery of such insensitive areas was considered de facto evidence of witchcraft.

Primary sources and early discussion

Puritan ministers throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony were exceedingly interested in the trial. Several traveled to Salem in order to gather information about the trial. After witnessing the trials first-hand and gathering accounts, these ministers presented various opinions about the trial starting in 1692.

Deodat Lawson, a former minister in Salem Village, visited Salem Village in March and April 1692. The resulting publication, entitled A Brief and True Narrative of Some Remarkable Passages Relating to Sundry Persons Afflicted by Witchcraft, at Salem Village: Which happened from the Nineteenth of March, to the Fifth of April 1692, was published while the trials were ongoing and relates evidence meant to convict the accused. Simultaneous with Lawson, William Milbourne, a Baptist minister in Boston, publicly petitioned the General Assembly in early June 1692, challenging the use of spectral evidence by the Court. Milbourne had to post £200 bond (equal to £39,548, or about US$42,000 today) or be arrested for "contriving, writing and publishing the said scandalous Papers".

The most famous primary source about the trials is Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, Lately Executed in New-England, printed in October 1692. This text had a tortured path to publication. Initially conceived as a promotion of the trials and a triumphant celebration of Mather's leadership, Mather had to rewrite the text and disclaim personal involvement as suspicion about spectral evidence started to build. Regardless, it was published in both Boston and London, with an introductory letter of endorsement by William Stoughton, the Chief Magistrate. The book included accounts of five trials, with much of the material copied directly from the court records, which were supplied to Mather by Stephen Sewall, a clerk in the court.

Title page of Wonders of the Invisible World (London, 1693) by Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather's father, Increase Mather, completed Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits at the same time as Wonders and published it in November 1692. This book was intended to judiciously acknowledge the growing doubts about spectral evidence, while still maintaining the accuracy of Cotton's rewritten, whitewashed text. Like his son, Increase minimized his personal involvement, although he included the full text of his August petition to the Salem court in support of spectral evidence. Judging from the apologetic tone of Cases of Conscience that the moral panic had subsided, Thomas Brattle directly ridiculed the "superstitions" of Salem and Increase's defense of his son in an open letter notable for its openly sarcastic tone.

Samuel Willard, minister of the Third Church in Boston was a onetime strong supporter of the trials and of spectral evidence but became increasingly concerned as the Mathers crushed dissent. Writing anonymously to conceal his dissent, he published a short tract entitled "Some Miscellany Observations On our present Debates respecting Witchcrafts, in a Dialogue Between S. & B." The authors were listed as "P. E. and J. A." (Philip English and John Alden), but the work is generally attributed to Willard. In it, two characters, S (Salem) and B (Boston), discuss the way the proceedings were being conducted, with "B" urging caution about the use of testimony from the afflicted and the confessors, stating, "whatever comes from them is to be suspected; and it is dangerous using or crediting them too far". This book lists its place of publication as Philadelphia, but it is believed to have been secretly printed in Boston.

Aftermath and closure

Reversals of attainder and compensation to the survivors

Title page of A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft by John Hale (Boston, 1702)

The first indication that public calls for justice were not over occurred in 1695 when Thomas Maule, a noted Quaker, publicly criticized the handling of the trials by the Puritan leaders in Chapter 29 of his book Truth Held Forth and Maintained, expanding on Increase Mather by stating, "it were better that one hundred Witches should live, than that one person be put to death for a witch, which is not a Witch". For publishing this book, Maule was imprisoned twelve months before he was tried and found not guilty.

On December 17, 1696, the General Court ruled that there would be a fast day on January 14, 1697, "referring to the late Tragedy, raised among us by Satan and his Instruments." On that day, Samuel Sewall asked Rev. Samuel Willard to read aloud his apology to the congregation of Boston's South Church, "to take the Blame & Shame" of the "late Commission of Oyer & Terminer at Salem". Thomas Fiske and eleven other trial jurors also asked forgiveness.

From 1693 to 1697, Robert Calef, a "weaver" and a cloth merchant in Boston, collected correspondence, court records and petitions, and other accounts of the trials, and placed them, for contrast, alongside portions of Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, under the title More Wonders of the Invisible World,

Calef could not get it published in Boston and he had to take it to London, where it was published in 1700. Scholars of the trials-Hutchinson, Upham, Burr, and even Poole-have relied on Calef's compilation of documents. John Hale, a minister in Beverly who was present at many of the proceedings, had completed his book, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft in 1697, which was not published until 1702, after his death, and perhaps in response to Calef's book. Expressing regret over the actions taken, Hale admitted, "Such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way."

Various petitions were filed between 1700 and 1703 with the Massachusetts government, demanding that the convictions be formally reversed. Those tried and found guilty were considered dead in the eyes of the law, and with convictions still on the books, those not executed were vulnerable to further accusations. The General Court initially reversed the attainder only for those who had filed petitions, only three people who had been convicted but not executed: Abigail Faulkner Sr., Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Wardwell. In 1703, another petition was filed, requesting a more equitable settlement for those wrongly accused, but it was not until 1709, when the General Court received a further request, that it took action on this proposal. In May 1709, 22 people who had been convicted of witchcraft, or whose relatives had been convicted of witchcraft, presented the government with a petition in which they demanded both a reversal of attainder and compensation for financial losses.

Repentance was evident within the Salem Village church. Rev. Joseph Green and the members of the church voted on February 14, 1703, after nearly two months of consideration, to reverse the excommunication of Martha Corey. On August 25, 1706, when Ann Putnam Jr., one of the most active accusers, joined the Salem Village church, she publicly asked forgiveness. She claimed that she had not acted out of malice, but had been deluded by Satan into denouncing innocent people, mentioning Rebecca Nurse, in particular, and was accepted for full membership.

On October 17, 1711, the General Court passed a bill reversing the judgment against the twenty-two people listed in the 1709 petition (there were seven additional people who had been convicted but had not signed the petition, but there was no reversal of attainder for them). Two months later, on December 17, 1711, Governor Joseph Dudley authorized monetary compensation to the 22 people in the 1709 petition. The amount of £578 12 s was authorized to be divided among the survivors and relatives of those accused, and most of the accounts were settled within a year, but Phillip English's extensive claims were not settled until 1718. Finally, on March 6, 1712, Rev. Nicholas Noyes and members of the Salem church reversed Noyes' earlier excommunications of Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey.

Rebecca Nurse's descendants erected an obelisk-shaped granite memorial in her memory in 1885 on the grounds of the Nurse Homestead in Danvers, with an inscription from John Greenleaf Whittier. In 1892, an additional monument was erected in honor of forty neighbors who signed a petition in support of Nurse.

Not all the condemned had been exonerated in the early 18th century. In 1957, descendants of the six people who had been wrongly convicted and executed but who had not been included in the bill for a reversal of attainder in 1711, or added to it in 1712, demanded that the General Court formally clear the names of their ancestral family members. An act was passed pronouncing the innocence of those accused, although it listed only Ann Pudeator by name. The others were listed only as "certain other persons", phrasing which failed specifically to name Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd and Margaret Scott.

The 300th anniversary of the trials was marked in 1992 in Salem and Danvers by a variety of events. A memorial park was dedicated in Salem which included stone slab benches inserted in the stone wall of the park for each of those executed in 1692. Speakers at the ceremony in August included playwright Arthur Miller and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. Danvers erected its own new memorial, and reinterred bones unearthed in the 1950s, assumed to be those of George Jacobs Sr., in a new resting place at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead.

In 1992, The Danvers Tercentennial Committee also persuaded the Massachusetts House of Representatives to issue a resolution honoring those who had died. After extensive efforts by Paula Keene, a Salem schoolteacher, state representatives J. Michael Ruane and Paul Tirone, along with others, issued a bill whereby the names of all those not previously listed were to be added to this resolution. When it was finally signed on October 31, 2001, by Governor Jane Swift, more than 300 years later, all were finally proclaimed innocent.

Land in the area was purchased by the city of Salem in 1936 and renamed "Witch Memorial Land" but no memorial was constructed on the site, and popular misconception persisted that the executions had occurred at the top of Gallows Hill. Rebecca Eames of Boxford, who was brought to Salem for questioning, stated that she was held at "the house below the hill" where she could see people attending executions. This helped researchers rule out the summit as the execution site. In January 2016, the University of Virginia announced its project team had determined the execution site on Gallows Hill in Salem, where nineteen "witches" had been hanged in public. Members of the Gallows Hill Project had worked with the city of Salem using old maps and documentation, as well as sophisticated GIS and ground-penetrating radar technology, to survey the area of what became known as Proctor's Ledge, located at the base of the hill, which they say was easier for spectators to reach than the top of Gallows Hill. The city owns the property and dedicated the Proctor's Ledge Memorial to the victims there in 2017. A documentary, Gallows Hill - Nineteen, is in production about these events.

In literature, media and popular culture

The story of the witchcraft accusations, trials and executions has captured the imagination of writers and artists in the centuries since the event took place. Their earliest impactful use as the basis for an item of popular fiction is the 1828 novel Rachel Dyer by John Neal.

Medical theories about the reported afflictions

The cause of the symptoms of those who claimed affliction continues to be a subject of interest. Various medical and psychological explanations for the observed symptoms have been explored by researchers, including psychological hysteria in response to Indian attacks, convulsive ergotism caused by eating rye bread made from grain infected by the fungus Claviceps purpurea (a natural substance from which LSD is derived), an epidemic of bird-borne encephalitis lethargica, and sleep paralysis to explain the nocturnal attacks alleged by some of the accusers. Some modern historians are less inclined to focus on biological explanations, preferring instead to explore motivations such as jealousy, spite, and a need for attention to explain the behavior.

References

Bibliography

Boyer, Paul S.; Nissenbaum, Stephen, eds. (1972), Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England, Northeastern University Press, ISBN 978-1-55553-165-2

Bunn, Ivan; Geiss, Gilbert (1997), Trial of Witches: A Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Prosecution, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-17109-0

Cooke, William H. (2009), Justice at Salem: Reexamining the Witch Trials, Undertaker Press, ISBN 978-1-59594-322-4, archived from the original on June 13, 2009

Francis, Richard (2005), Judge Sewall's Apology, Harper-Collins

Glanvill, Joseph. "Essay IV Against modern Sadducism in the matter of Witches and Apparitions" in Essay on several important subjects in philosophy and religion, 2nd Ed, London; printed for John Baker and H. Mortlock, 1676, pp. 1-4 (in the history 201 course-pack compiled by S. McSheffrey & T. McCormick)

Mather, Cotton. Memorable Providence, Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions. law.umkc.edu (accessed June 5, 2010)

Trans. Montague Summer. Questions VII & XI. "Maleus Maleficarum Part I." sacred-texts.com Archived February 23, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, June 9, 2010.

The Examination of Bridget Bishop, April 19, 1692. "Examination and Evidence of Some Accused Witches in Salem, 1692. law.umkc.edu (accessed June 5, 2010)

The Examination of Sarah Good, March 1, 1692. "Examination and Evidence of Some the Accused Witches in Salem, 1692. law.umkc.edu Archived January 20, 2011, at the Wayback Machine (accessed June 6, 2010)

Further reading

Baker, Emerson W. A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience (2014), Emphasis on the causes

Boyer, Paul & Nissenbaum, Stephen. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. 1974. ISBN 0-674-78526-6

Burns, Margo & Rosenthal, Bernard. "Examination of the Records of the Salem Witch Trials". William and Mary Quarterly, 2008, Vol. 65, No. 3, pp. 401-422.

Demos, John. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. ISBN 0-19-517483-6

Foulds, Diane E. (2010). Death in Salem: The Private Lives Behind the 1692 Witch Hunt.

Godbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge University Press: New York. 1992. ISBN 0-521-46670-9

Goss, K. David (2007). The Salem Witch Trials: A Reference Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-32095-8.

Hale, Rev. John. (1702). A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft.

Hill, Frances. A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials. Doubleday: New York. 1995. ISBN 0-306-81159-6

Hoffer, Peter Charles. "The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History". (University of Kansas, 1997). ISBN 0-7006-0859-1

Levack, Brian P. ed. The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (2013) excerpt and text search Archived March 20, 2021, at the Wayback Machine

Miller, Arthur. The Crucible - a play which compares McCarthyism to a witch-hunt. ISBN 0-14-243733-6

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Random House, 2002. ISBN 0-375-70690-9

Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. Crown Publishers Inc., 1959. ISBN 0-600-01183-6

Sologuk, Sally. Diseases Can Bewitch Durum Millers. Milling Journal. Second quarter 2005.

Spanos, N.P., J. Gottlieb. "Ergots and Salem village witchcraft: A critical appraisal". Science: 194. 1390-1394:1976.

Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts. University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, MA. 1984. ISBN 0-87023-494-3

Preston, VK. "Reproducing Witchcraft: Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live". TDR / The Drama Review, 2018, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 143-159

Gagnon, Daniel A., A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse. Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2021.ISBN 978-1594163678

External links

Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692, University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School

Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, University of Virginia, archive of extensive primary sources, including court papers, maps, interactive maps, and biographies (includes former "Massachusetts Historical Society" link)

Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II, by Charles Upham, 1867, Project Gutenberg

SalemWitchTrials.com Essays, biographies of the accused and afflicted, Salem Witch Trials website

Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World. Observations as Well Historical as Theological, upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of the Devils (1693) (online pdf edition), at Digital Commons

Salem Witch Trials Archived June 6, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, Salem website.

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The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men).