ABSTRACT
The buildup of the Second Red Scare began on February 9, 1950, when Senator Joseph McCarthy burst into the collective American consciousness with a speech he gave to the Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. In which he declared that he had in his possession, indeed, in his hand, a list of spies working at that very moment in the US State Department. Before he made his Wheeling speech, McCarthy had been an inconsequential politician who had early demonstrated that he was not very scrupulous when it came to promoting his own political career. McCarthy's weapons were words, not legislation. Following the Yalta Agreement, the Amerasia Affair was a critical early development in building up toward the red scare, bringing public attention to the possibility of subversive activity in the United States. These events made up the raw material for McCarthy's tale of treason in Wheeling and, the tale having been told, the press took up the story.
