Historic Congressional Committee Hearings and Reports

In 1953, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations . For six weeks in 1954, the nation was riveted by the televised hearings of the committee, now known as the Army-McCarthy hearings:

From April 22 to June 17, 1954, the ABC and Du Mont television networks provided full coverage of these Senate hearings, which became known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings. The two networks provided a total of 188 hours of gavel-to-gavel coverage over the 36 days of hearings, while CBS and NBC carried nightly highlights.

During this time, the hearings focused on cross accusations between Senator McCarthy and the U.S. Army — the Army accused McCarthy's office of attempting to obtain special treatment for a recently drafted McCarthy staff member while McCarthy accused the Army of holding his exstaff member hostage in order to interfere with McCarthy's investigation into Communists in the Department of Defense. McCarthy gave up his chairmanship of the committee so he could appear as a witness and make his case on national television. The strategy backfired when McCarthy's unpleasant personality and hostile style turned public opinion against him and his cause. In December 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure McCarthy for conduct unbecoming a Senator.

From April 22 to June 17, 1954, the ABC and Du Mont television networks provided full coverage of these Senate hearings, which became known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings. The two networks provided a total of 188 hours of gavel-to-gavel coverage over the 36 days of hearings, while CBS and NBC carried nightly highlights.

Excerpted from the article "Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations" in The A/V A to Z: An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Media, Entertainment, and Other Audiovisual Terms. Read the rest of the article in the Credo Reference database. 

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Joseph McCarthy, a Republican Senator from Wisconsin, was notorious for making condemning accusations to smear the names of his opponents. His name has been transformed into the term McCarthyism, used to describe personal attacks through indiscriminate allegations and uncorroborated charges....The roots of McCarthyism run deep in American political culture and are not simply explained by any excesses of partisan politics. McCarthyism was but one strand of what historian Richard Hofstadter once referred to as the “paranoid style in American politics.” Periodically there explodes on the American political landscape a wave of antiradicalism. In 1798 it resulted in the Alien and Sedition Acts. In the mid-1800s it helped form and support the Know-Nothing Party. In the 1920s it produced the Red Scare. In the 1960s it led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the peace movement to see if it was controlled from abroad. Because their occurrence is so closely tied with America's involvement in international conflicts, this antiradicalism can also be seen as a reflection of America's frustrations with realizing its quest for absolute security.

From the article "McCarthyism" in the Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy. Read the rest of this article in the Credo Reference database. 

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