February 9, 1950: Joseph McCarthy delivers his “Enemies from Within” speech.

An excerpt from the Senator’s speech, delivered in Wheeling, West Virginia:

“Six years ago, … there was within the Soviet orbit, 180,000,000 people. Lined up on the antitotalitarian side there were in the world at that time, roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only six years later, there are 800,000,000 people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia—an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500,000,000. In other words, in less than six years, the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5 against us.

This indicates the swiftness of the tempo of Communist victories and American defeats in the cold war. As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.” …

The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

McCarthy’s speech both exacerbated the public’s growing fear of communism and gained massive press coverage (although no recording of the speech even exists) and national recognition for the Senator himself, which he exploited until the end of the “Second Red Scare” to target American Communists and Communist sympathizers. His name has come to represent the paranoia and recklessness of the era as a whole.