Letters from an American - February 8, 2026

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

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February 8, 26. On February 9th, 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin, stood up in front of the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, at a gathering to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln's birthday. The senator waved a piece of paper and later recalled telling the audience, 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. He said he didn't have time to share the names of all those individuals, but he assured the audience that the Democratic administration of President Harry S. Truman was refusing to investigate traitors in the government.

Secretary of State Dean Atchison, who was busy trying to hammer together the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, and the Marshall Plan to provide aid to European countries rebuilding after World War II, later said McCarthy's Wheeling speech was a good representation of the senator's work. It was the rambling, ill-prepared result of his slovenly, lazy, and undisciplined habits. McCarthy was an undistinguished junior senator running for re-election and needed an issue. With his dramatic statement, he found it in attacks on the post-war rules-based international order those like Acheson were trying to build. The staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune, whose editor hated the idea of using American resources to help foreign governments,

trumpeted the story and threw its weight behind the idea that Democrats were trying to destroy. the United States. The next day, McCarthy pledged to share the names of 57 card-carrying communists in the State Department with Acheson so long as the Secretary would let Congress investigate the loyalty records of the people in his department. Then McCarthy telegraphed Truman, charging him with protecting communists in government. The Chicago Tribune put the accusations on the front page, and McCarthy's office sent out copies of his missive. Failure on your part will label the Democratic Party as being the bedfellow of

international communism, McCarthy wrote. McCarthy's critics pointed out that he never produced any evidence of his wild claims, but their outrage gained far less attention than the claims themselves. He yelled, he made crazy accusations, he leaked fragments of truth that misrepresented reality, He hectored and badgered. He perfected the art of grabbing headlines and then staying ahead of the fact checkers. By the time reporters called out his lies, they were already old news,

and the fact-checking got buried deep in the papers. The front page would have McCarthy's newest accusation. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, when Communist North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and Communist China, invaded South Korea, anti-communism, and McCarthy's warning that there was a secret plot among Democrats to make America communist gain traction. He spoke widely across the country that summer, and in the

midterm elections in fall 1950, every candidate he endorsed won. Using his lies to gain power, McCarthy rampaged across the next years, ruining lives through lies and innuendo. McCarthy's star fell abruptly in May 1954 when Americans watched him lie and berate witnesses in televised hearings. But in that same month, the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, opened up a different avenue for far-right extremists to argue that Democrats were undermining society by trying to usher in communism. reaching back to the racist tropes of reconstruction, they claimed that federal protection of black equality before the law was socialism, because enforcing civil rights required government personnel who could be paid only through taxes. Those calling for equality before the law were, in this formulation, redistributing money from taxes levied on hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving black people.

The idea that a secret group was undermining America to make it socialist continued into the 1980s when films like Red Dawn in 1984 the bloodiest movie ever made told the story of a group of everyday Americans fighting communists who were taking over their town with the collaboration of the government. In the film, the Wolverines, an embattled group of high school football players in Colorado, fighting. off a communist invasion of Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans. The mayor and his son cooperate with the communists, making the heroic wolverines the underdogs fighting both world communism and their own government. The idea that everyday Americans had to fight their government to protect the nation so inspired a group of young men that in 2003, when leaders in the George W. Bush administration decided to search for Saddam Hussein, they named the effort Operation Red Dawn. The soldiers began by looking in two sites they dubbed Wolverine I and Wolverine II. With the U.S. economy so

obviously weighted toward the wealthy in the past decades, garnering power by warning that Democrats are trying to usher in socialism has been a hard sell. But that idea has evolved among right-wing thinkers to underpin another conspiracy theory that fits snugly in the space previously occupied by the idea that black and brown Americans and their allies are destroying the country through socialism. The Great Replacement Theory says that elites, often a code word for Jews, are deliberately replacing white European populations with non-white immigrants using mass migration and white birthright that are lower than those of migrants. Those indebted people's will, the theory goes,

keep the elites in power in exchange for social welfare programs. Like the conspiracy theory about socialism, the Great Replacement Theory has roots in the nation's past. In 1916, lawyer Madison Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European Hays. of European history. Grant's book drew from similar European works to argue that the Nordic race, which had settled England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted

for the best of human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by immigrants from inferior white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and corruption. To strengthen Nordic race, Grant advocated on the one hand for an end to immigration and for selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit through sterilization, and on the other hand for efforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes. Grant's ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws, as well as the 1924 Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after Germany's Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant's book in his speeches

and wrote to Grant describing the book as, My Bible. A 1973 French dystopian novel anticipated the modern Great Replacement Theory by showing immigrants from third-world countries, destroying European society. But observers tend to date the emergence of this theory from the 2011 publication of Le Grand Replacement, or the Great Replacement by Renaud Camus, a French writer who claims that Muslims in France are destroying French culture and civilization. The theory has become influential among the far right in Europe and Canada. But it moves in a straight line from the Republican insistence that black voters and their allies would destroy the U.S. with socialism. Trump nodded to the Great Replacement Theory in his 2016 run for the presidency,

saying when he announced his candidacy in 2015 that Mexico was sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. On August 11, 2017, the influence of the Great Replacement Theory on Americans burst into public awareness when racists, anti-Semites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and other alt-right groups met in Charlottesville, Virginia, to unite the right. They chanted, you will not replace us. will not replace us, and blood and soil. In addition to that Nazi slogan, they gave Nazi salutes and carried Nazi insignia. Rather than denouncing them, President Trump refused to

condemn them, telling a reporter that they were very fine people on both sides. That statement marked Trump's open embrace of the far right that backed the Great Replacement Theory, snaking it into public discourse through lies like the claims that former President Joe Biden had created open borders, and that countries were sending criminal migrants to the U.S. And by repeating terms like illegal monster, killers, gang members, poisoning our country, taking your jobs, and a dead giveaway, the largest invasion in the history of our country. At the urging of then candidate Trump in January 2024, Republicans refused to pass a bipartisan immigration reform measure hammered out by Senate negotiators over months. The bill appropriated

$20.3 billion for border security, increased the number of immigration judges to end-case backlogs, sped up asylum processes, and closed the border during high traffic periods. It did not include a path to citizenship for those brought to the U.S. as children, the so-called dreamers, making the measure skew toward Republican demands rather than Democratic priorities. Nonetheless, Trump urged his supporters to kill it, and they did. Teeing up a campaign in which he and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, emulated Senator Joe McCarthy as they hammered on immigration fears, lying about open borders and migrant crime, claiming that a Venezuelan gang had taken over and was terrorizing Aurora, Colorado,

and insisting falsely that Haitian immigrants were eating white neighbor's pets in Springfield, Ohio. While many Trump voters appeared to cling to the belief that a Trump administration would deport only criminal immigrants, which they thought meant those who had committed violent crimes, Trump's team appeared to embrace the Great Replacement Theory that defined all non-white Americans as a threat to the nation. Now, along with Vice President J.D. Vance, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noem and others, they are making the idea of purging brown and black people from the United States central to federal policy, both at home and abroad. In September, Trump told European nations at the United Nations General Assembly that the unmitigated immigration disaster is destroying your heritage.

If you don't stop people that you've never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail, Trump told them. It's time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. I can tell you I'm really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell, he said. McCarthy's supporters in the 1950s claimed that his lies were necessary

for keeping Republicans in power. The ends justified the means. Neither journalists nor politicians could figure out how to counter McCarthy's tactics. It was the American people who finally destroyed his career, turning against him when they realized, he realized he was hurting decent people and lying to them to gain power.

Suddenly, reporters ignored him, the Senate condemned him, and he died only two and a half years later, likely from complications relating to alcoholism. Wisconsin voters elected Democrat William Proxmire to replace him. Proxmire told voters that McCarthy was a disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead of Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.