How far would you go to fight communism? In the early 1950s, a number of American political leaders

repeatedly told the American public that they should be very fearful of subversive communist

influences in their lives. Americans were continually reminded that communists were all around them.

They could be lurking anywhere, using their positions as school teachers, college professors,

labor organizers, artists, actors, or journalists to aid the nefarious agenda of world

communist domination. They could be your neighbors, your child's nanny. If you weren't

constantly vigilant against communism, you could quickly find yourself indoctrinated directly into

it.

This paranoia about the internal communist threat, consistently labeled as the enemy within,

reached a fever pitch between 1950 and 1954, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged communist penetration of the State Department,

the White House, the Treasury, even the U.S. Army. McCarthy took it upon himself to expose these

communist bastards and their sympathizers throughout all of American cultural and political life.

And for a few years, almost no one dared to tangle with McCarthy.

They were afraid, afraid that they would show up in

his crosshairs next, that they would be labeled a traitor, a subversive, that their careers would be

destroyed, their lives ruined, for just being tainted with the accusation of maybe, possibly,

being a communist. While no other name is associated with communist paranoia more strongly than

Joseph McCarthy, McCarthy did not invent communist paranoia. Far from it, actually. He did take it

much further, though, than any individual politician had ever done before him. And in doing so,

he became the most polarizing political figure in America. At the height of his popularity, he had many supporters and peers who absolutely loved him

and what he was doing.

But he also had many detractors who utterly despised him and felt he was either a paranoid fool

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