McCarthyism

This day in 1954 saw the beginning of the end of the witch-hunting era named after Senator Joe McCarthy. On June 9th, it was Joseph Welch, a mild-mannered Army lawyer, whose famous rebuke seemed to waken America from a bad dream. "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Joe McCarthy, the failed chicken farmer and upstate Wisconsin judge, had been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, where he served in obscurity. Then in February 19