At first, McCarthyism was a partisan affair. Wisconsin’s junior
senator rocketed to political stardom in February 1950, when he
told the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia,
that Harry Truman’s State Department was infested with
Communists. As that year’s midterm campaign progressed, Joe
McCarthy’s staff helped doctor a photo of Maryland Democrat
Millard Tydings, making him appear to be huddled with former
U.S. Communist Party chief Earl Browder. PRESIDENT Roosevelt’s
overwhelming victory promises to change the face of American
political life. Even those expert observers who predicted a
landslide did not envisage the unprecedented majority, both in
popular vote and the electoral college, that he rolled up. As
early as eleven o’clock on election night, when the first
returns indicated a Roosevelt victory in every one of the
doubtful states, and a popular majority of perhaps 9,000,000,
leading Republican politicians and newspapers began to concede
that their cause was hopeless; only the incredibl