Recently, an anniversary passed unnoticed: when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin became part of the national consciousness with his anti-communist crusade. Nevada was part of its beginning, seventy-five years ago.
On February 9, 1950, McCarthy addressed the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. He was quoted as saying, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
Two nights later, McCarthy was in Reno to speak before the Lincoln Day banquet of Nevada republicans in the Mapes Hotel. That afternoon, the Reno Evening Gazette headline read, “McCarthy Prepares to List Communists at GOP Session.” It covered his speech that night. Republican Senator George W. Malone, who had been accusing Harry Truman’s administration of socialist leanings, introduced McCarthy. The Gazette reported that the senator from Wisconsin “declared that the state department has at least 57 card-carrying Communists on its payroll,” “twisted-minded would-be intellectuals who have sold out 620
million people to the Communists.” He mentioned four names specifically without directly calling them communists.
The next day, a State Department official, Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy, asked McCarthy to name the 57 communists. He said, “If you have this information, as a loyal American you owe it to your country to inform the officials responsible.” Of the four people McCarthy mentioned in Reno, Puerifoy said three of them no longer worked for the State Department. The fourth had been through four loyalty investigations and cleared each time. He also said if there were communists in the State Department, he would fire them.
As it turned out, McCarthy never provided fifty-seven names. The one who remained in the State Department, John Stewart Service, had predicted that the Chinese communists led by Mao-Tse Tung would defeat the nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek. He was right. But after McCarthy’s charges, the State Department reviewed him again, and said there was “reasonable doubt” about Service. Secretary of State Dean Acheson fired him. Service sued, and the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the State Department had to rehire him. The Loyalty Review Board had found no evidence of disloyalty, the justices said.
What became known as McCarthyism didn’t begin in Nevada. Nevada had plenty to do with it, though. One of McCarthy’s closest
allies was the state’s powerful senior U.S. senator, Pat McCarran. His McCarran International Security Act and McCarran-Walter Immigration Act was aimed at those he believed guilty of communist sympathies, whether or not they actually were. Reno attorney Julien Sourwine would be one of his top investigators. One of McCarthy’s most important antagonists in the media would be Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, who we will be talking about again soon.
Fears of communism had been common in the United States from the publication of The Communist Manifesto onward. Concerns about the spread of communism would help trigger the Korean War, starting in 1950. They also contributed to a defense buildup that increased the size of Nellis Air Force Base and led to the creation of the Nevada Test Site. Not all because of McCarthy. But in February 1950, in Reno, he helped light the fire.