32 pages • 1 hour read
Joseph McCarthyEnemies from Within Speech
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Communism
McCarthy conflates the term “Communism” with what might more accurately termed “Stalinism”—a brutal centralization of totalitarian power in the Soviet Union. McCarthy takes advantage of Josef Stalin’s unquestionably violent and inhumane dictatorship to paint all forms of Communism as inherently totalitarian. In doing so, he establishes a Manichaean framework—a battle between good and evil, with the totalitarian, Communist world on one side and the antitotalitarian “Christian democracies” of the West on the other.
Ideologies
McCarthy presents the bipolar parameters of the Cold War as an apocalyptic battle between two opposing ideologies, rather than a physical war of materials. Ideology refers to the basic cognitive framework of an entire society through which the world is assessed. Ideology is so firmly entrenched in a people’s way of thinking that it seems invisible or indistinguishable from reality itself. McCarthy only uses the term only once to frame the world as split between two spheres of ideas, the “western Christian world and the atheistic communist world” (829).
Red Herring
As scrutiny regarding the loyalty of government employees intensified in the postwar years, President Truman began to express his displeasure with the House Un-American Activities Committee’s excessive inquiries. He not infrequently referred to such inquiries as “red herrings”—a literary term referring to plot details intended to mislead or distract the reader. With this idiom, Truman was suggesting that these inquiries were distractions from the real, important work of government. The term could also indicate a distraction meant to prevent the exposure of something one wanted to hide, such as a conspiracy.
When McCarthy criticizes Truman for referring to the Alger Hiss case as a red herring, the negative connotation takes on additional force because the color red is associated with Communism. McCarthy uses the term twice, in the second case to point to out that Truman labeled the case a red herring even after Hiss’s conviction.
Specter
Karl Marx famously includes the phrase “specter of Communism” in the first pages of Communist Manifesto. The manifesto was first published in 1848, when Lincoln would have been 39 years old, or in McCarthy’s terms, “a relatively young man in his late thirties” (829). The use of the term “specter” in the manifesto refers to the circulation of ideas rather than military conflict. McCarthy’s use of the term with regards to Soviet military expansion is meant to create a sense of foreboding, suggesting the standard definition of specter as a phantasm or something that haunts the mind. In addition, the meaning of the word “specter,” as an invisible or disembodied force troubling events, is a metaphor for McCarthy’s conspiracy of a sprawling Communist network: The Communists presumably infiltrated every level of government but were entirely elusive in concrete terms. The menace remained unseen.
