Enemies from Within Speech

Though McCarthy’s “Enemies from Within” is often credited with inaugurating the political movement that bears his name, the second Red Scare was already underway before he made the speech. Red-baiting in politics was not uncommon in the post-war years. Accusing a political opponent of being insufficiently anti-Communist was a frequent tactic used by conservative politicians, and even Harry Truman, a Democrat, used the ploy against his progressive rival Henry Wallace. There was an anti-Communist fervor in American life before the United States entered the Second Cold War, as evidenced in the 1938 formation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which primarily investigated alleged Communist activity.

Several months before the end of the war, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin met at the Yalta Conference to discuss the reorganization of Europe in the war’s aftermath. The agreements initially seemed favorable to the United States. Stalin agreed to break the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and enter the war on the side of the Allies in the Pacific, although it is worth noting that the Soviet Union only declared war on Japan after the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stalin also agreed to maintain peaceful relations with neighboring European countries, but when the war ended, he broke the agreement by invading and occupying much of Eastern Europe.

Such unforeseen outcomes of the Yalta Conference contributed to growing apprehension regarding the threat from the Soviet Union and Communism in general. In response to Soviet aggression and to address the complicated geopolitical situation, President Truman delivered what would become known as the Truman Doctrine speech before the joint session of Congress in 1947. Truman established the commitment of both military and economic assistance to democratic countries shattered by the war and to those under threat from authoritarian forces. The Economic Recovery Act of 1948 involved a military component as well, laying the foundations for what would become the new national security state. These policy initiatives constituted a shift from isolationism to a robust foreign interventionism, and changes such as these would require the consent of Congress and from the nation. In the Truman Doctrine speech, the president portrayed the world in stark, morally absolutist terms as a conflict between democracy and totalitarian domination, and the public was receptive to this new Cold War framework. Anxieties in the postwar years were directed toward the red menace. But there was also increasing concern that the Communist threat had permeated even the branches of government. Other programs, such as Truman’s executive order the Federal Employee Loyalty Program of 1947, seemed to substantiate the trepidation about possible subversive activities taking place within an official capacity.

In 1948, the State Department official Alger Hiss was accused of passing classified documents to the Soviet Union. That he was also a member of the delegation sent to Yalta aroused further suspicion of Communist infiltration. In August of 1949, the Soviet Union successfully detonated an atom bomb. This was psychologically jarring for Americans, who had derived a sense of security from the US monopoly on nuclear weapons. A few months later, Chiang Kai-shek was driven out of China by the Communist armies of Mao Zedong, and the People’s Republic of China was established. A month before McCarthy’s “Enemies from Within” speech, British intelligence had arrested German physicist Klaus Fuchs for passing information on the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. All these troubling events meant that when McCarthy gave his speech to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, casting the world as a stark conflict between democracy and autocracy, his audience was both ideologically and emotionally receptive.