ABSTRACT
In early 1950, Joe McCarthy was an undistinguished first-term senator, very unpopular with his Senate colleagues, with no solid base of support at home, and widely suspected of being corrupt. Since the late 1960s, conceptions of McCarthyism have been so altered or embroidered that many bear little resemblance to that of the contemporary critics; in fact they sometimes invert it. McCarthyism incorporated a weird distortion all its own, which rendered the Soviets' agents more important than their employers. Since 1919 some conservatives in the United States, as in other Western democracies, had occasionally smeared their domestic political enemies or measures they opposed as "Communist". In the congressional elections of 1946, some Republican candidates used accusations, usually false, that their opponents were Communists or pro-Communist with some effect. In 1948, the government prosecuted the Politburo of the American Communist Party for violating the Smith Act by advocating the overthrow of the government by force.
