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Joseph McCarthyEnemies from Within Speech
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Joseph R. McCarthy
Joseph R. McCarthy was raised by parents of modest means on a farm near Appleton, Wisconsin. He received a bachelor of laws degree from Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee and, once admitted to the bar, went into private practice. In 1939 McCarthy became a circuit judge, where he worked for several years before joining the Marines and serving as ground staff in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. As judges were exempt from the draft, McCarthy’s decision to join the Marines was plausibly opportunistic, as military experience would bolster his political credentials. Upon discharge, McCarthy ran for a Republican Senate seat and won in the Republican sweep of 1946. Richard Nixon won a seat in the house in the same election and in the following years played a much fiercer roll regarding the issue of anti-Communism than McCarthy, whose record as a senator was unexceptional.
On February 9, 1950, McCarthy was scheduled to give a routine Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, as other Republican politicians fanned out to other cities for similar events. He arrived with his briefcase, in which he kept the assembled notes for a speech on Communists in government. The speech, which came to be known as the “Enemies from Within” speech, would dramatically alter the face of American politics and inaugurate a movement that would bear his name. In the years that followed, McCarthy’s search for the Communist infiltration of government continued unabated. At the height of his influence in 1953, he was head of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and was also involved in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy conducted hearings wherein he alleged Communist subversion not just in the State Department but in the US Army, echoing his remarks at Wheeling. McCarthy’s downfall began when the subcommittee he formerly chaired began an investigation into his attacks on the US military, resulting in the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy’s Republican allies began to distance themselves from what some deemed to be reckless activity. The Army-McCarthy hearings would portend the end of his career as a politician.
Dean Acheson
Dean Acheson was the Undersecretary of State to George Marshall when the Soviet Union successfully detonated an atom bomb, and three months later Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution declared victory with the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The Truman administration adjusted to these new, shocking realities by elevating Acheson to Secretary of State, replacing Marshall. To find an appropriate response to the Soviets’ acquisition of an atom bomb, President Truman consulted the Z Committee, which included Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, Secretary of State Acheson, and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission David E. Lilienthal. They decided to begin the construction of a hydrogen bomb. When the discussion focused on whether building such a doomsday weapon was morally correct, Acheson bristled at the question. In his view, the committee should concern itself solely with the practical questions of how to build the bomb, such as the amount of plutonium required, leaving the moral and philosophical dilemmas to others. At a time when McCarthy, who framed the Cold War as a morality play, was accusing Acheson of being “the enemy withing,” Acheson was building the weapons that—in his view—would help the US to win the Cold War.
The first reference to Dean Acheson in the “Enemies from Within” speech is indirect, in that McCarthy simply portrays the men in the State Department as having been “born with silver spoons in their mouths” (830). But the disparaging remark was aimed at Acheson, whom McCarthy considered to be pompous and elite. When McCarthy claims that while Chiang Kai-shek “was fighting our war” the State Department insisted that the United States “torpedo our ally,” he wasn’t entirely wrong. Acheson was in fact critical of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, not because he preferred Mao Zedong’s Communist army but because he believed that the destruction of Chiang Kai-shek’s army was imminent. A few weeks before McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, which was somewhat damaging to the Truman administration, especially since the president had referred to the trial as a red herring. Acheson exacerbated the situation when, on the day of Hiss’s sentencing, he said publicly that he had no intention of turning his back on Alger Hiss. To many of Acheson’s allies this response was inexplicable. McCarthy was apoplectic, especially when Acheson referenced the Sermon on the Mount as a justification for his statement. That Acheson plays a major role in McCarthy’s Wheeling speech is evident in the text.
Alger Hiss
Joseph McCarthy introduced Alger Hiss as “the convicted traitor” in his “Enemies from Within” speech. In fact, Hiss had been convicted only of perjury. The espionage charges against him had been dropped due to the expiration of the statute of limitations—leaving an information vacuum McCarthy was happy to exploit. McCarthy explained to his audience that it was unnecessary to detail the “sordid events” of the Hiss case that would show exactly how Hiss “sold out the nation” (831). For McCarthy, Hiss was not important as an individual but rather as “representative of a group in the State Department” (831). McCarthy casts Hiss as the embodiment of a corrupt elite—a group he describes as having been received “the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give” (830). Like many other state department officials, Hiss was an Ivy League graduate, having attended Harvard Law School before serving as a clerk to Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was a New Deal Democrat who became a State Department official in the Office of Far Eastern Affairs during the Second World War. Toward the end of the war, Hiss was part of the delegation that attended the Yalta conference with the “Big Three” Allied leaders: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Stalin. McCarthy suggests that Hiss, functioning as Roosevelt’s advisor while the president was terribly ill and (McCarthy implies) mentally impaired, asserted undue influence over the proceedings. He also claimed that the Yalta conference report, drafted by both Hiss and the Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko, was demonstrative of a complete surrender to Stalin.
The legacy of Alger Hiss is ambiguous because of a trial that never took place, not to mention the scandal surrounding his name in the postwar years. Truman called the prosecution a red herring even after Hiss’s conviction, and Acheson wasn’t alone either in his support for Hiss. The support may have been based simply on the fact that Hiss successfully pushed back on Stalin at the Yalta Conference. Stalin demanded that all 16 republics of the Soviet Union should be included as initial members at the United Nations, and Hiss blocked him from doing so. The Hiss Memorandum, which he presented at Yalta, made clear that each member state would have a single vote. Hiss’s supporters were probably aware of this fact and considered it a testament to his patriotism.
