McCarthy, the 1954 Censure and the Republicans Who Said Enough

Let me start with an uncomfortable admission, because the left will never make it for us and some on the right never will either: Joe McCarthy was a Republican, and the Republicans in the Senate were the ones who had to deal with him. Not a Democratic administration, not the press, not a Hollywood committee. His own party's senators, in his own caucus, in his own chamber. How they handled it tells you more about the right way to run an investigation than a hundred speeches about "accountability."

I am not going to pretend the story is simple, and I am not going to give you the version the other side enjoys, in which anyone who ever worried about Soviet spies was a villain. That version is false. The Soviet Union ran real espionage operations in the United States, and the country had real reasons to be alarmed. The question that matters, and the one the Senate had to answer in 1954, is a different one: when a man uses a legitimate concern as a license to ignore the rules of evidence, fair procedure and common decency, who stops him, and how? Let me take you through it in order.

The threat was real

Start where honest history starts. In the late 1940s Americans learned, one headline at a time, that the Soviet Union had penetrated parts of the government. The Alger Hiss case ended in January 1950, when Hiss, a former State Department official, was convicted of perjury for denying that he had passed documents to a Soviet contact. The Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 and executed in June 1953. Later, after the Cold War ended, the release of decrypted Soviet cables from a wartime program known as Venona confirmed that Soviet intelligence had run agents inside American institutions.

So the premise of the anti-communist cause was not hysteria. It was a response to a documented danger. Republicans, as the party out of power for most of the years from 1933 to 1953, pressed the issue hard, and on the central point they were right. Keep that in mind, because everything that follows is about means, not ends.

How the senator from Wisconsin took over the issue

On February 9, 1950, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of communists working in the State Department. The numbers he gave shifted from one telling to the next, and the evidence he offered never matched the size of his claims. A Senate subcommittee led by a Democrat, Millard Tydings of Maryland, investigated and concluded the charges were baseless. But by then McCarthy had found the thing he needed: a stage and an audience.

When Republicans won control of the Senate in the 1952 elections, McCarthy became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. That gave him the power to subpoena witnesses, to hold hearings, and to set the agenda. A gavel is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. A chairman can turn a legitimate inquiry into a spectacle in an afternoon, and McCarthy did, summoning government employees and others in hearings that produced headlines faster than they produced proof.

The Declaration of Conscience

The first Republican to say so out loud was a woman from Maine. On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith rose in the Senate chamber and delivered what she called a Declaration of Conscience. She did not defend communism, and she did not suggest that the government should stop looking for spies. She said that the Senate was being used as a forum for hate and character assassination, and that Americans were losing the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to think independently. Six other Republican senators signed on with her: Wayne Morse, Irving Ives, Charles Tobey, Edward Thye, George Aiken and Robert Hendrickson.

Look at what she did and did not do. She did not attack McCarthy by name in the text. She did not call the cause illegitimate. She argued that the cause deserved better methods, and that a party which wanted to win the argument on communism could not do it by abandoning the principle that a person is innocent until proved otherwise. It was a conservative argument in the strict sense of the word: conserve the rules that make a free country free. For her full speech and its legacy, see Margaret Chase Smith took on Joe McCarthy from inside her own party in 1950.

The immediate effect was small. McCarthy's allies mocked the seven senators, and the party mostly looked the other way. Courage in politics often goes unrewarded in the first year. But the declaration planted a flag, and when the moment came for a vote, there were senators who could say they had objected from the beginning.

The Army-McCarthy hearings

Fast forward to the spring of 1954. McCarthy's subcommittee clashed with the U.S. Army over a set of charges and counter-charges, including the treatment of a staff member who had been drafted. The Senate decided to hold hearings to sort it out, and they began on April 22, 1954. They were televised. For the first time, millions of Americans could watch the senator work instead of reading about him.

What they saw was a man who interrupted, who raised points of order at every turn, who produced documents whose origins were disputed and who accused witnesses without waiting for them to answer. On June 9, 1954, Joseph Welch, the Army's lawyer, a Boston attorney with a mild manner and a long record, responded to an attack McCarthy had launched against a young lawyer in Welch's own firm. Welch asked a question that was heard across the country: have you no sense of decency, sir? It is one of the few lines from American political life that has survived because it says exactly what millions of viewers were thinking.

I want you to notice something about the order of events. By the time of Welch's rebuke, Republicans in the Senate had already begun to move. Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a manufacturer turned senator, had given a speech on the Senate floor in March 1954 criticizing McCarthy, and in July 1954 he introduced a resolution to censure him. It was Republicans, not the opposition, who started the formal process.

The Watkins committee

The Senate did what the Senate does when a problem is awkward: it created a committee. The Select Committee to Study Censure Charges was chaired by Arthur Watkins, a Republican from Utah, a man of unflashy temperament and strict habits. He was known for the opposite temperament from McCarthy's. The committee was made up of three Republicans and three Democrats, and it did its work with discipline, holding hearings in the late summer of 1954 and issuing a report in September.

Here is why that matters. Watkins ran the committee exactly the way McCarthy had not run his. Witnesses were given notice. Charges were specific. Rules were applied evenly. The committee examined a set of counts concerning McCarthy's conduct, including his treatment of a Senate subcommittee that had investigated him earlier and his abuse of witnesses and fellow senators, and recommended that the Senate condemn him on some of them. The result was a lesson in the way to do this job: you can go after a powerful man without becoming him, if you follow the rules while he breaks them.

The vote

On December 2, 1954, the full Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn Joseph McCarthy. The resolution used the word "condemn" rather than "censure," a matter of wording the Senate chose, but it is universally remembered as the censure. Republicans split evenly, 22 for and 22 against, and the Democrats voted as a bloc against him. In other words, the vote did not break on party lines in the way people assume; the party that held the Senate was torn nearly down the middle. A Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, kept his distance publicly rather than pick a fight with a Senate committee chairman from his own party, and historians still argue about whether that was prudence or timidity. On his wider view of power and its limits, see Eisenhower's farewell address gave two warnings and Republicans remember one.

McCarthy was left a diminished figure. When Democrats took the Senate majority in January 1955, he lost his chairmanship. He died on May 2, 1957.

The best case that the censure was a mistake

Now, fairness demands the strongest version of the other side, and there is one. Some conservatives to this day argue that the censure was an overreaction. Their points deserve a hearing.

One, McCarthy was right about the central danger, and the establishment that hounded him later admitted that Soviet penetration was real. Why punish a man who had the right target?

Two, the media and the political class turned on him not because of his methods alone but because he threatened their comfort. Hostile coverage was not neutral.

Three, the Senate should not discipline a member for speech and tactics that a majority of voters in his state had endorsed. Wisconsin had re-elected him.

Four, the standard used was loose. If every senator who was rude to a witness faced censure, the chamber would do little else.

These points have some force, and the first one is right as far as it goes. But here is the answer, in order.

1. Being right about the target does not make the method right. A prosecutor who convicts a guilty man by fabricating evidence has not served justice; he has made it harder to convict the next guilty man. McCarthy's recklessness gave an entire anti-communist cause a bad name, and the people he named wrongly were not the spies.
2. The Venona cables did not vindicate his list. They confirmed that spies existed. They did not confirm the particular charges he made against particular officials, and his numbers kept moving.
3. A Senate has the constitutional power to discipline its own members. Article I, Section 5 says each house may determine the rules of its proceedings and punish its members for disorderly behavior. Using it on a chairman who abused witnesses is not an assault on free speech. It is the Senate policing its own subpoena power.
4. The standard was specific. The Watkins committee did not condemn him for being rude. It looked at particular acts and put them before the full Senate.

My verdict: the Senate got it right, and the Republicans who said enough did the party a lasting service. They saved the anti-communist cause from its loudest champion.

What serious oversight looks like

If there is one lesson for a Republican voter, it is that oversight is a tool, and a tool can be used properly or abused. Properly used, a congressional investigation does four things. It states a clear question. It gathers documents and testimony under rules that give witnesses notice and a chance to respond. It reaches findings that can be checked. And it ends in action, whether a law, a reform or a referral. Abused, it substitutes the first headline for the last finding.

Compare that with the pattern the Watkins committee followed, and with the later model set by Senator Howard Baker in the Watergate hearings, who kept asking what the president knew and when he knew it, a question that applied equally to a president of his own party. For that story, read Howard Baker asked what the president knew and why oversight is conservative. Both examples show something the loud version of politics forgets: the credibility of an investigation depends on whether it would treat a member of your own team the same way. The party that can discipline its own is the party that is believed when it goes after anyone else. For the principle underneath, see Why Conservatives Defend Due Process Even for People They Dislike and Equal Under the Law Means the Rule Applies to the People in Charge.

The same test applies to every committee chairman, of either party, ever since. When a hearing is held, ask whether the witness got a fair chance to answer, whether the evidence is on the table, and whether the chairman would use the same rules if the target were a friend. The votes page and the record of how members voted are there so you can check. If you are curious about the larger fight over who decides what Congress can compel, Watergate Day by Day and the Republicans Who Told Nixon It Was Over covers the next big test of Republican integrity, twenty years later.

The bottom line

• The threat from Soviet espionage was real. Taking it seriously was right, and Republicans who said so were not hysterics.
• Joe McCarthy's methods were the problem: shifting numbers, no proof, and abuse of witnesses under a chairman's gavel. Margaret Chase Smith and six colleagues said so in 1950, and Ralph Flanders started the formal process in 1954.
• The Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn him on December 2, 1954, with Republicans split down the middle. Arthur Watkins's committee showed how to discipline a member by following the rules he ignored.
• When you evaluate any congressional hearing, ask three questions: Does the witness get notice and a fair chance? Is the evidence public? Would the chairman run it the same way if the target were an ally?
• Support oversight that is serious, and be wary of oversight that is a show. The first wins arguments. The second loses elections and, worse, loses trust.