60 years ago this week, Pat McCarran (D-NV) started work on the McCarran Act, an omnibus internal security bill - a serious imposition on civil liberties. As conservative as Sen. McCarran was, the real reason for the egregious bill was the rising tide of McCarthyist anticommunism. The popular groundswell was being used as a factless bludgeon to question the 'loyalty' of Democrats ahead of the 1950 midterm election.
In an attempt to head off the McCarran Act, a number of liberal Democrats put together a substitute - a bill which gave the president the ability to intern suspected subversives in the case of an 'internal security emergency'. This 'concentration camp bill' (as a Truman aide called it) was a frightening 'substitute' - but it seems to indicate the degree to which Democrats were running scared. In a ridiculous irony, the provisions of the 'concentration camp bill' were added to the McCarran Act during the reconciliation process, with the ludicrous result that a number of liberals, including Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, William Benton, and Clinton Anderson, found themselves voting for McCarran's bill, which passed, seventy to seven.
Coming to their senses, many of the liberal Senators who voted for the act then demanded that Truman veto it, which he did, describing it as "the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien and Sedition Laws". Unfortunately, both houses of Congress acted to override the veto, over the filibuster of Humphrey and William 'Wild Bill' Langer (R-ND). Langer, being a bit 'mavericky', was the lone Republican in opposition to the McCarran Act. On the floor of the Senate, Langer described the Act as, "one of the most vicious and dangerous pieces of legislation against the people".
Though Senator McCarthy wasn't a sponsor of the McCarran Act, the rapid veto override was seen within the Truman administration as an indicator of how little political capital the administration had. The McCarran Act's steamroller passage seemed to demonstrate that neither the White House or Congress could halt the march of anticommunism, which was more or less synonymous with McCarthyism.
That Summer, McCarthy's Wisconsin seat was not up for re-election, and he toured the country in what was then considered to be a flurry of appearances - thirty stops in fifteen states. He gave the same speech each time, and it had one message - hunt the "pinkos", and get the "commiecrats" out of government.
McCarthy's speeches were purely personal attacks, devoid of substance. Democrats were "egg sucking phonies", "pitiful whiners", "prancing mimics of the Moscow party line" - and worse, they were all "liberals". In every speech, he explicitly attacked Secretary of State Dean Acheson, describing him as a "dilettante diplomat" who "whined", "whimpered", and "cringed" before America's "enemies".
The midterm election that November was expected to lean to the right - the Dixiecrat revolt had begun, the urban 'machines' were weakening, and the Korean War was broadly unpopular. The Republicans pushed a bizarre idea that Sec. State Acheson had "invited" North Korea to invade South Korea by not mentioning the latter in a public statement describing a (metaphorical) 'defense perimeter' in Asia.
McCarthy campaigned most heavily against Millard Tydings (D-MD) - Tydings was the subcommittee member who most vocally opposed McCarthy, describing McCarthy's investigations as "a fraud and a hoax". (McCarthy never denied Tydings repeated assertions that the investigations were based on pure fabrication - he ignored the issue of veracity, and simply insisted that Tydings objections gave "a green light to the Red fifth column", and claimed that Tydings was using "the techniques of Goebbels and Vishinsky"). Tydings was a conservative Democrat, having notably opposed civil rights measures, alienating labor and African-Americans. In addition, McCarthy raised large sums for Tydings' opponent, an unknown named Marshall Butler, and arranged for an article to appear in the newspaper that featured a doctored photograph of Tydings in conservation with Earl Browder, chairman of the US Communist Party. When called on it, McCarthy described the photo as a "composite', 'intended to illustrate". Tydings lost by 40,000 votes (out of ~600k votes).
The midterm election of 1950 saw Richard Nixon, a 'Red hunter' from the House take a seat in the Senate from notedly liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-CA). Taking a rhetorical cue from McCarthy, Nixon described Douglas as 'the pink lady', and asserting a crisis in Washington, declared that "the chips are down... the American people are coming for the administration commiecrat betrayal party".
Despite their high hopes and McCarthy's overwhelming popularity, the Republican Party failed to return the majority of seats they lost to Truman's 1948 groundswell, his "Give 'em hell" campaign. In part, President Truman, always a fiery campaigner, helped to stem the bleeding from the anticommunist witch-hunt, repeatedly counter-attacking Republicans who used it. During one of Truman's weekly radio addresses, he described those Republicans who used 'the Red issue' as having "lost all sense of restraint, all sense of patriotic decency". In the end, the Republicans gained twenty-eight seats in the House, and five in the Senate.