Enemies from Within Speech

McCarthy’s “Enemies from Within” speech serves as a warning to his audience about the imminent Communist threat, and while this speech was directed at the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, the speech would inform and inflame the anti-Communist movement nationwide. The speech is delivered using emotive techniques such as oversimplification, apocalyptic rhetoric, and the rhetorical tradition of the jeremiad.

McCarthy begins his Wheeling speech with a gracious nod to the 16th president. With exalted language he refers to former president Lincoln as “one of the greatest men in American History” and calls the anniversary “a glorious day” in the scope of world history (829). In the following sentence, McCarthy draws a parallel between Lincoln’s laudable contempt for war and the prevailing desire for peace and disarmament in the postwar years. McCarthy argues, however, that this desire for peace is undermined by a brutal Cold War and armaments race. By presenting Lincoln as a pacifist, McCarthy produces a rhetorical feint that increases the dramatic effect of what follows. Moreover, McCarthy’s use of the phrase “peace in our time” is noteworthy in its striking similarity to the title of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s speech, “Peace for Our Time,” which was given to honor the Munich Pact signed with Hitler in 1938, a pact which Hitler promptly broke. In the postwar years, Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler came to represent the dangerous failure of appeasement and the folly of offering concessions to a dictator. McCarthy’s audience would have noted the reference, especially considering that the dictator Stalin had more recently broken a similar agreement, launching a campaign of aggression against Eastern Europe. The opposition between war and peace in the first sentences of McCarthy’s speech reflects the counterintuitive arc of his argument itself: America, the most militarily powerful and prosperous nation in the world, is losing the Cold War because the country is infiltrated with Communists.

McCarthy channels the fears and anxieties of his audience by appealing to emotion rather than logic; in rhetorical terms, he focuses on pathos rather than logos. In the next sentences, McCarthy portrays the world as split between two “hostile, armed camps” both racing to acquire superior armaments for a “showdown fight” (829). He describes a palpable sense of danger where one can physically see, feel, and hear the “mutterings and rumblings” of the newly invigorated “god of war” (829). This apocalyptic rhetoric directs the audience toward the dark forces that McCarthy insists can be heard all over the world. McCarthy frames the difference between these two warring ideologies in terms of morality rather than politics. The “Christian world” is pitted against the “atheistic communist world,” suggesting a conflict between good and evil (829). There is a quasi-religious cast in McCarthy’s descriptions of the battle between atheistic Communism and Christian democracy, as evidenced in the phrase “religion of immoralism” or the opposition of “communistic atheism” against “Christianity.”(829) The “religion of immoralism” may seem an odd descriptor for an ideology McCarthy has previously characterized as atheistic, but for McCarthy’s audience, the phrase suggests a powerful binary: Just as good Christian Americans worship God, Communists worship the state and its all-powerful leader, Stalin. McCarthy substantiates the imminent threat of Communism with a quote from Lenin, who predicts that “frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states will be inevitable” (829). Again, McCarthy frames the conflict between atheistic Communism and democratic Christianity in apocalyptic terms with the phrase “final show-down,” a reference both to the Book of Revelation and to the more familiar confrontations in Western movies.

In his seminal essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter captures McCarthy’s campaign to root out Communists buried in the system (Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. New York: Vintage, 2008. 3-40.) The supposition that there is a clandestine cabal of Communists who have infiltrated the government hinges on the exaggeration and distortion of data, which necessitates a perpetual watchfulness where every event or connection is consequential. McCarthy insists on the need to be vigilant in the first paragraphs of his speech. He announces the prospect of nuclear annihilation with the caveat that this eventuality could be avoided if only people “finally decide that no longer can we safely blind our eyes” to the facts that are “shaping up more and more clearly” (830). The shadowy nature of the conspiracy requires a constant state of surveillance and a perpetual review of the “facts.” And while the speech is couched in apocalyptic terms, McCarthy promotes his various claims and accusations with a catalogue of data. He cites population statistics, witness testimony, and the names of Communists who have infiltrated the State Department, as proof of the sprawling conspiracy. As an example of the conspiratorial mindset, Arthur Bliss Lane’s response to the Yalta Conference Agreement is instructive: “I could not believe my eyes….to me, almost every line spoke of a surrender to Stalin” (831). Such a statement not only attests to the paranoid logic of what became known as “McCarthyism” but suggests an indulgent method of interpretation.

After listing the Communist treacheries committed at the Yalta conference, McCarthy suggests that the graft, corruption, and disloyalty resulted from a “lack of moral uprising” (831) on behalf of the American people. In other words, he seems to blame Americans themselves (in this case, his audience). McCarthy asks his audience if there is anyone “tonight who is so blind as to say that the war is not on” or who fails to recognize that “the time is now” (830). He warns that if people do not address the crisis, they will pay the ultimate price. McCarthy’s use of apocalyptic rhetoric is reminiscent of the Puritan tradition of the jeremiad, in which a community is chastised for their apostasy and urged to change course in order to avoid an impending doom. The failure to rise to this moment is caused by the heft of war and the subsequent “emotional hang-over,” which leads to a “moral lapse,” leaving the body politic apathetic and numb (832). For McCarthy, the antidote to this moral apathy is to inflame the righteous indignation of his audience.

McCarthy reminds his audience that the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, recommended against investigating Communist traitor Alger Hiss. He reiterates the fact that Acheson said he would vouch for Hiss completely and referenced Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as his justification for turning the proverbial cheek. For McCarthy, Hiss’s crimes are the equivalent of selling out “the Christian world to the atheistic world” and Acheson’s reference to the Sermon on the Mount in this context is blasphemous (832). Nevertheless, just as with the tradition of the jeremiad, moral castigation comes with the proffer of hope. McCarthy claims that that Acheson’s invocation of Christ was so offensive to American Christians that it generated widespread public outrage, a reaction that “would have made the heart of Abraham Lincoln happy” (831). McCarthy’s greatest hope is that this traitorous blasphemy and high treason will be the necessary spark to reawaken the “dormant, inherent decency” (832) and the righteous anger of the American people.