Joseph McCarthy was one of those self-made Americans. He worked and willed his way from ignorance and anonymity to the United States Senate. Senator McCarthy fulfilled the American dream... then turned it into a national nightmare.
Born on a small Wisconsin farm in 1908, Joe was one of nine children. At 14, he went to work on a chicken farm. Determined to succeed, he eventually completed high school and attended Marquette University.
Joe worked every kind of job he could find in order to stay in school. He was even the focus of a story in the Milwaukee Sentinel newspaper about a fine young man who was working his way through college. As it happened, he was dating the reporter who wrote it.
At Marquette, McCarthy developed his poker skills. Unlike most of the affluent students, Joe could seldom afford to lose. A biographer writes that on one occasion he "made a killing at the expense of some alumni on a football trip to Pittsburgh".
Joe joined the student debate club and went out for boxing. Confrontation lay at the heart of both activities and Joe thrived on it. Not surprisingly, he pursued a degree in Law. After passing the Wisconsin Bar, McCarthy opened a law office. With few clients, he again turned to poker to supplement his income. In the early years most of his practice came not at the Court House but at Ben Johnson's Bar on the edge of town.
Newspaper columnist Jack Anderson wrote, "He became a pokerplaying fanatic, sitting in Johnson's back room until early in the morning".
When Joe got on a roll, he'd leave "his law office unoccupied for a whole day while he tried to run up his winnings".
According to Anderson, "He bluffed so much that his opponents could never tell whether he had a good hand or a bad one." Consequently, "He would often rake in $100 or $200 at a time...."
McCarthy played an aggressive, take-no-prisoners, win-by-any-meansnecessary style of poker.
An attorney who played with him recalled, "He had the guts of a burglar. He was brutal. He took all the fun out of the game because he took it so seriously."
A respected McCarthy biographer wrote, "He would cheat at cards, and roar with laughter when caught. It wasn't for the money; he merely wanted to see what he could get away with. Some players were not amused."
One night McCarthy and other attorneys in a trial were playing poker at the Elks Club when word came that the jury had returned with a verdict.
They all shoved their cards in their pockets and returned to the courtroom. When it was over, the game resumed.
When the U.S. entered World War II, McCarthy joined the Marines. After the war, he decided to capitalize on his military service and seek the Republican Senate nomination as a war hero, a record he largely exaggerated. In 1946, at the age of 38, Joe was elected to the Senate.
Soon after WWII ended, what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called an "Iron Curtain" descended around Eastern Europe and the world was thrust into the Cold War. Soon, Russia and the specter of Communism had replaced Germany and the Nazis as the principal threats to peace and prosperity in the post-war era.
By the early 1950s, our former ally Russia was now our foremost enemy. The war in Korea was not going well, and communism was conquering China. After two world wars in little more than twenty years, the possibility of another global conflagration created national fear and paranoia.
An ex-Marine with reelection on the horizon, Senator McCarthy made himself Commander of an anti-communist crusade. Mixing poker and patriotism, he warned the country, "We cannot blind our eyes to the fact that we are engaged in a showdown... between Communist atheism and Christian democracy. The chips are almost down... You can hear the rumblings of another war."
Americans were told that the greatest threat to freedom and security at home came from within. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the American Communist Party a fast growing "fifth column" seeking the destruction of Democracy in America. HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee, launched wellpublicized hearings on communists in the movie industry.
The passionately patriotic Senator from Wisconsin led a national witch-hunt for communists. He blamed the loss of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union on a State Department riddled with communists. He accused members of Truman's administration and the military of having communist ties. And, anyone who criticized him soon found themselves the target of his accusations, especially Democrats.
Eventually, Senator McCarthy pushed his luck too far. The damage destruction resulting from unsubstantiated claims, exaggeration, misleading interpretation, and innuendo, caught up with him. The beginning of the end of Joe McCarthy's reign of terror came in 1954 when highly regarded news commentator Edward R. Murrow used his television show, See It Now, to expose McCarthy's methods and madness. Now, others had the courage to confront the Senator.
In December, 1954, the United States Senate passed a censure motion condemning Joe's conduct.
It had become clear; in the 1950s the greatest threat to freedom in America was McCarthyism more than Communism.
Always a hard drinker, he buried himself in alcohol. Disgraced, Joe McCarthy died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1957.
