Army-McCarthy Hearings Facts
Army-McCarthy Hearings Facts
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Interesting Army-McCarthy Hearings Facts: |
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Republican Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota chaired the committee during the hearings. |
The hearings were covered live by the ABC and now defunct DuMont television networks for the full thirty-six days from April 22 to June 17. More than eighty million people watched at least part of the hearings, making it one of the major American television events of the 1950s. |
Schine was from a wealthy hotel magnate family, which is where he got his start in the anti-communist movement. He wrote a short booklet titled Definition of Communism and placed it in the rooms. |
During the hearings, accusations of homosexual activity were leveled by both sides against each other. Roy Cohn later came out as a homosexual and died of AIDS in 1986 at the age of fifty-nine. |
John G. Adams, a World War II veteran, was the legal counsel for the Army during the hearings and Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer, acted as chief counsel for the Army. |
McCarthy produced a letter that he claimed was written by then head of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover, warning of communists in the Army signal corps. Although Hoover himself never testified, the Attorney General claimed no such letter was ever written. |
One of the more dramatic points in the hearings took place when McCarthy implied that a fellow lawyer of Welch's from his law firm had communist sympathies. Welch replied, "Have you left no sense of decency?" |
A Gallup poll before the hearings had McCarthy at 50% approval and 29% disapproval. After the well-televised hearings he was at 36% approval and 45% disapproval. |
The Republicans lost the majority of both houses of Congress in the 1954 midterm election, which cost McCarthy his chair on the Subcommittee on Investigations. |
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