McCarthy's Americans

Was the communist witch hunt unleashed by Senator Joe McCarthy an aberration, or has red scare politics been an intrinsic part of American political life since the 1930s? Was McCarthyism a populist or an elitist phenomenon? Was Senator McCarthy virtually irrelevant to the phenomenon? M. J. Heale's deeply probing study of Joe McCarthy's "hinterland" in the American states demonstrates that what is usually called McCarthyism was part of a political cycle that emerged in the 1930s and took two decades to run its course. Defying the "consensus liberalism" of the 1950s, Joe McCarthy and, more importantly, the many little McCarthys in the states, kept alive a brand of right-wing politics, preparing the way for George Wallace in the 1960s and the revitalized conservatism of Richard Nixon in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.