How Did McCarthyism End? Hearings, Censure, and Supreme Court Rulings

McCarthyism came to an end through three overlapping forces: the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954, which exposed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s methods to roughly 20 million viewers; a formal Senate condemnation that December, which stripped him of political power; and a run of Supreme Court decisions in the late 1950s and 1960s that tore down the loyalty-security legal framework the era had been built on. McCarthy’s personal collapse took about a year. Dismantling the institutional machinery took more than a decade.

The Army-McCarthy Hearings Turned Public Opinion

The most visible turning point was the Army-McCarthy hearings, which ran from April 22 to June 17, 1954. ABC and DuMont carried 188 hours of gavel-to-gavel coverage, with CBS and NBC providing nightly highlights.¹ An estimated 20 million people watched.²

For the first time, McCarthy’s tactics played out in living rooms rather than in newspaper summaries. Viewers watched his repeated “point of order” interruptions, his bullying of witnesses, and his attempts to introduce doctored photographs and documents.³ Gallup polling captured the effect. McCarthy’s favorable rating dropped from 39% to 32% between February and June 1954, and 64% of the public said he had hurt himself by appearing.⁴

The single most remembered exchange came on June 9, 1954. McCarthy attacked Fred Fisher, a young associate at the Boston law firm Hale and Dorr, accusing him of past membership in the National Lawyers Guild while at Harvard Law School.⁵ The Army’s special counsel, Joseph Welch, had already removed Fisher from the defense team to avoid this exact line of attack. When McCarthy persisted, Welch answered:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad… 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?”²

The gallery applauded. The final report, largely drafted by Robert F. Kennedy, cleared the Army of wrongdoing.²

Broadcast journalism had already begun to break the silence. On March 9, 1954, CBS’s Edward R. Murrow devoted an episode of See It Now to McCarthy, using the senator’s own footage to document what Murrow described as his “extreme rudeness and disregard for the truth.” “Accusation is not proof,” Murrow told viewers, warning that the country could not “defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”⁶ Shortly after the broadcast, the other members of McCarthy’s own subcommittee voted unanimously to remove him as chair for the coming Army inquiry.³

Eisenhower Worked Against McCarthy Behind the Scenes

President Dwight D. Eisenhower avoided public confrontation, believing it would only elevate the senator. “Nothing will be so effective as to ignore him,” he noted in April 1953.⁷ Privately he told his speechwriter C.D. Jackson, “I will not get in the gutter with that guy.”⁸

When McCarthy began investigating the Army in late 1953, Eisenhower shifted tactics. He ordered his aides to gather evidence that McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had pressured the Army to give preferential treatment to Cohn’s associate G. David Schine, who had recently been drafted. On March 11, 1954, Assistant Secretary of Defense Fred Seaton released a 34-page report documenting those efforts to key senators and to the press, setting the Army-McCarthy hearings in motion.⁷ In May 1954, Eisenhower invoked executive privilege to order all executive branch employees to refuse to testify before McCarthy’s subcommittee about internal government communications, effectively cutting off his supply of witnesses.⁸

The Senate Censured McCarthy in December 1954

On July 30, 1954, Republican Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont introduced a censure resolution. It went to a bipartisan select committee chaired by Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah, which reviewed 46 charges of misconduct and narrowed them to five categories.⁹ McCarthy attacked the committee itself, accusing its members of “deliberate deception” and “fraud,” calling the proceedings a “lynch-party,” labeling Watkins “cowardly” and “stupid,” and describing the committee as an “unwitting handmaiden” of the Communist Party.¹⁰

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn McCarthy for conduct “contrary to senatorial traditions” on two counts: obstruction of the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections during its 1951–1952 investigation, and abuse of the Watkins Committee itself.⁹ Every Democrat voted in favor. Republicans split evenly.³

The condemnation ended his political influence. McCarthy lost interest in public affairs, neglected his Senate duties, and drank heavily. He died at Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957, before completing his second term.¹¹ By June 1955, Eisenhower was calling the fading movement “McCarthywasm.”⁷

The Senate also began cleaning up the procedural conditions that had enabled the abuses. In 1955, McCarthy’s former subcommittee adopted new rules requiring majority approval for investigations, giving minority members the right to hire their own staff, and guaranteeing all members access to committee information.²

Supreme Court Rulings Dismantled the Legal Machinery

Censuring McCarthy did not, on its own, dismantle the legal architecture of the Red Scare. Loyalty screening, congressional inquisitions, and Smith Act prosecutions continued. What broke that machinery was a series of Supreme Court decisions in the years that followed.

Watkins and Sweezy: Limits on Congressional Investigations

On June 17, 1957, in Watkins v. United States, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a 6–1 majority holding that the House Un-American Activities Committee had exceeded its authority and denied a labor organizer due process by never adequately explaining how its questions related to any legitimate legislative purpose.¹² Congressional investigations, the Court said, could not override individual constitutional rights simply by invoking national security. That same year, in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, the Court applied similar limits to state-level anti-communist inquiries, holding that legislative investigations “are capable of encroaching upon the constitutional liberties of individuals” and protecting First Amendment interests in academic freedom and political expression.¹³

Yates: The End of Smith Act Prosecutions

The government’s prosecutorial engine ran on the Smith Act. Under the 1951 precedent of Dennis v. United States, the Court had upheld convictions of Communist Party leaders using a loose “clear and present danger” standard that permitted prosecution even when the probability of revolution was low.¹⁴ Operating under Dennis, the government brought 15 prosecutions involving 129 individuals and obtained 96 convictions.¹⁵

Also decided on June 17, 1957, Yates v. United States drew a sharp distinction between advocating the abstract idea of overthrowing the government and inciting people to take concrete action toward that end. Only the latter could be criminalized. Justice John Marshall Harlan II, writing for a 6–1 majority, reversed the convictions of 14 Communist Party members, ordering acquittals for five and new trials for the rest.¹⁶ The evidentiary bar the decision set was so high that Smith Act prosecutions were, in effect, ended.¹⁵ Only one later conviction survived: Scales v. United States in 1961, a 5–4 ruling under the Smith Act’s membership clause. Junius Scales served 15 months before President Kennedy commuted his sentence on Christmas Eve 1962.¹⁷

Brandenburg: The New Free Speech Standard

The doctrinal shift Yates began was completed in 1969 with Brandenburg v. Ohio. Overturning the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader under a criminal syndicalism statute, the Court set the standard that still governs incitement: speech can be criminalized only when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “is likely to incite or produce such action.”¹⁸ The looser standards that had enabled McCarthyism-era prosecutions were replaced with far stronger protections for political speech.¹⁹ Justice William O. Douglas, concurring, pointed directly to the Cold War-era “loyalty security hearings” beginning in 1947 as the kind of First Amendment violations the old standards had enabled.

What Lingered After McCarthy Fell

HUAC survived McCarthy by two decades, increasingly challenged by activists who turned its hearings into public spectacles. It was renamed the House Committee on Internal Security in 1969 and abolished in 1975, with its files transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.²⁰

The Hollywood blacklist’s symbolic end came in 1960, when Kirk Douglas publicly credited blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter of Spartacus. For most of the people whose careers and lives had been broken, however, there was no restoration. As late as 1972, the New York City Board of Education was still acting to reinstate teachers who had lost their jobs during the era.²¹ When the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations later unsealed its McCarthy-era hearing transcripts, the committee described them as “a part of our national past that we can neither afford to forget nor permit to reoccur.”²²

1
Boston Public Library. Army-McCarthy Hearings
2
Levin Center. Joe McCarthy’s Oversight Abuses
3
Levin Center. McCarthy’s Oversight Abuses
4
National Bureau of Economic Research. McCarthyism Working Paper
5
Politico. McCarthy Assailed by Army Counsel, June 9, 1954
6
Bill of Rights Institute. Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, March 9, 1954
7
National Archives. Ike and McCarthy
8
Miller Center. McCarthyism and the Red Scare
9
U.S. Senate. Censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy
10
National Archives. Censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy
11
EBSCO Research Starters. Joseph McCarthy
12
Oyez. Watkins v. United States
13
Middle Tennessee State University First Amendment Encyclopedia. Sweezy v. New Hampshire
14
Justia. Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494
15
Middle Tennessee State University First Amendment Encyclopedia. Yates v. United States
16
Oyez. Yates v. United States
17
Middle Tennessee State University First Amendment Encyclopedia. Scales v. United States
18
Justia. Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444
19
Cornell Law Institute. Brandenburg Test
20
National Archives. HUAC Records
21
Middle Tennessee State University First Amendment Encyclopedia. Blacklists
22
The Conversation. Political Witch Hunts and Blacklists