McCarthyism, also called the Second Red Scare, was the wave of anticommunist fear, investigation, and persecution that gripped the United States from roughly 1947 to 1957. Named for Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, it reached far beyond him: loyalty boards, congressional committees, and the FBI hunted suspected Communists in government, Hollywood, schools, and unions, costing thousands their jobs and reputations while exposing almost no actual spies.
On a February evening in 1950, a little-known senator held up a sheet of paper in Wheeling, West Virginia, and announced he had the names of Communists working inside the State Department. He never showed the list. The number of names kept changing in his own retellings. Yet within weeks his charge had a whole nation searching its own institutions for hidden traitors, and a word for the search: McCarthyism.