The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 was designed to reform immigration law and naturalization procedures, solidifying them under a single section of federal code.
The act, sponsored by Democratic representative Francis Walter of Pennsylvania and Democratic senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, made important changes to the U. S. immigration policy. Although the heart of the quota system put in place by the 1924 National Origins Act was retained, the new law made some modifications to it. Asian countries, which had previously been denied the right to send immigrants, were each assigned the minimum quota of 100 immigrants annually. Even this meager amount could be cut because of the most blatantly racist feature of the bill, which required that any immigrant with at least one-half Asian ancestry be counted in the quota. No such feature applied to other people of mixed ethnicity. The same minimal quota was also granted to immigrants from European colonies. This reduced the number of people who could immigrate from these areas because previously they were listed under the much larger quota of the country that ruled over them. All quotas were restructured by requiring that half of the quota be reserved for people with special skills. Children and spouses of American citizens were allowed to come to the United States outside the quota framework.
Naturalization and deportation procedures were also changed. The existing prohibition against people of certain
Ethnic backgrounds (most notably Asians) from becoming American citizens was removed. Executive branch officials, however, were given more power and latitude in deporting resident aliens. The president was given the power to halt all immigration.
The bill’s supporters praised it as a way to help families and end racial and gender discrimination in immigration and naturalization. They also argued that the procedural changes made by the bill would enhance government efforts “to weed out subversives and other undesirables from citizenship.” The bill’s supporters believed that it would have “a favorable effect on our international relations, particularly in the Far East.”
While praising some features of the bill, especially those that expanded citizenship and allowed easier immigration for family members, the bill’s critics maintained that in many cases it did the opposite of what its supporters claimed. They pointed out that the national origins formula on which the quota system was based was discriminatory. This led the New York Times to describe the bill as “racist, restrictionist, and reactionary.” President Harry S. Truman went even further when he vetoed the bill, pointing out that several members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had extremely low quotas and that this was a source of tension within the alliance. Truman went on to say that the retention of quotas was counterproductive because “we do not need to be protected against immigrants from those countries—on the contrary we want to stretch out a helping hand.” He saw the United States as a haven for those who fled communism.
Other major objections to the bill involved the expanded power it gave the executive branch. Aside from the unprecedented power of the president to close off all immigration, critics charged that the parts of the bill touted as protecting the United States from dangerous immigrants went too far, in assuming that every alien had a suspicious character that needed to be monitored. The ease with which the act gave government officials the right to deport aliens had great potential for abuse, especially since little distinction was made between serious crimes and petty offensives. This power and discretion left immigrants at the mercy of government bureaucrats and therefore in a more vulnerable position than they had previously occupied.
Despite these objections, there was overwhelming support for the measure, and Congress overrode Truman’s veto. While the McCarran-Walter Act had serious shortcomings, it encompassed steps toward the goal of equal treatment under the law for all ethnic groups in America.
Further reading: Reed Veda, Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994).
—Dave Price
McCarthy, Eugene (1916-2005) U. S. senator Eugene McCarthy, a U. S. senator from Minnesota, nearly captured the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination running as a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, and, as a result, President Lyndon B. Johnson dropped his bid for reelection.
Eugene Joseph McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in the rural farming village of Watkins, Minnesota. McCarthy’s family was strongly rooted in the local Catholic church, and he spent his first 11 years of schooling at St. Anthony’s School in Watkins. At the age of 15, McCarthy left home and enrolled at St. John’s Preparatory School in Colleg-eville, Minnesota. The institution, run by the Benedictine monks of the St. John’s Abbey, shaped McCarthy’s intellectual and spiritual life both as a prep school student and as an undergraduate at the adjacent St. John’s University. While excelling academically at the university, McCarthy was also an outstanding athlete, playing both baseball and hockey.
Following his graduation from St. John’s University in 1935, McCarthy found little work in the depression-era job market for a 19-year-old with a bachelor’s degree in English, regardless of his academic record. He took up work as a public schoolteacher, and briefly as a school principal, while working on his master’s degree from the University of Minnesota. He returned to St. John’s as a faculty member from 1940 to 1943 before leaving to serve in the War Department’s military intelligence division until the end of World War II.
In 1948, McCarthy made his first successful bid for public office, running on Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party ticket for the U. S. House of Representatives. During his stint in the House, McCarthy became known for his decidedly liberal voting record. Elected to the Senate in 1958, McCarthy served with relatively little national attention until the fall of 1967, when he announced his plans to challenge President Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination. The centerpiece of McCarthy’s surprise candidacy was his determined opposition to the war in Vietnam.
As a senator in 1964, McCarthy supported the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the president broad discretionary powers over U. S. involvement in Vietnam following an apparently unprovoked attack on American vessels in international waters. By 1967, however, McCarthy had become a vocal critic of the war and the president’s handling of the conflict. The Johnson administration initially disregarded his single-issue candidacy, but McCarthy collected a loyal following of Democrats who opposed continued involvement in the war. McCarthy had not, in fact, been the first choice of antiwar movement leaders to challenge Johnson. After several leading Democrats refused to run against the president, activists turned to the little-known senator from Minnesota, and McCarthy responded favorably. His campaign began to gain steam during the winter of 1968, and in the March 1968 New Hampshire primary, McCarthy captured 20 of 24 delegates, prompting Johnson’s shocking withdrawal from the presidential race.
McCarthy went on to sweep the next three primaries, but Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy, defeated the Minnesota senator in four of the following five primaries. Kennedy had initially rejected the plea from antiwar leaders to enter the nomination race against Johnson, which had opened the door for McCarthy to accept the antiwar mantle. Kennedy’s entrance into the campaign brought an end to McCarthy’s momentum in the primaries, and after Kennedy was assassinated following his victory in the California primary, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey declared himself a candidate for the nomination despite not being entered in a single state primary.
At the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which was characterized by violent clashes between Chicago police and antiwar and civil rights protestors in the city’s parks and streets, McCarthy lost the nomination to Humphrey. The turmoil outside the convention hall greatly disturbed McCarthy, who addressed a crowd of over 2,000 protestors in Grant Park on the final night of the convention, hoping to calm the volatile situation. Television cameras captured the disruption at the convention and broadcast it to viewers across the country. The images of police violence and tear gas assaults on the demonstrators seriously impaired the chance of success for Humphrey in the general election, which he lost to Republican Richard M. Nixon.
In 1970, McCarthy decided not to run for reelection in the Senate, and Humphrey won his seat. McCarthy made two more campaigns for the presidency in 1972 and 1976, but then he retired to a career of writing and lecturing. He died on December 10, 2005.
Further reading: Albert Eisele, Almost to the Presidency (Blue Earth, Minn.: The Piper Company, 1972).
—Guy R. Temple
McCarthy, Joseph R. (1908-1957) anti-Communist senator
Capitalizing on American fears of communism during the cold war, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy dominated the political landscape of the early 1950s with his accusations of communist infiltration within the U. S. government. His use of broad allegations with little or no evidence to support them induced a paranoia within American culture that came to be known as McCarthyism.
Born on November 14, 1908, in a small town in northeastern Wisconsin, McCarthy was the son of Irish Catholic farmers. He was a boisterous child who worked both on the farm and in his own businesses until 1929, when he graduated high school in only one year. He entered Marquette University the following year, where he studied law, graduating in 1935, and he then worked for a prominent Wisconsin attorney. Unsatisfied with his job, McCarthy ran a series of aggressive campaigns for district attorney (which he lost in 1936) and circuit judge (which he won in 1938) that were characterized by thorough, resourceful, and ruthless inflammatory rhetoric and distortions of the truth.
McCarthy enlisted in the U. S. Marine Corps in 1942. While on leave in 1944, he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for the Senate, even though he was considered a New Deal Democrat and a staunch supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. McCarthy returned to military service until the end of World War II, and, in 1946, he defeated incumbent senator Robert La Follette, Jr. for the Republican nomination and Democrat John M. Murphy in the general election. During the campaign, McCarthy used communism as an issue to attack his opponents. He was not the first to do so; Republicans, anxious to reclaim the majority after over 10 years of Democratic rule in the White House and Congress, knew that the issue of “domestic subversion” within the Democratic Party was too simple and too effective to ignore.
On February 9, 1950, in a speech to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy claimed he had “a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” McCarthy never intended the speech to be the start of a nationwide crusade against communism, but by the next day his claims were picked up by the Associated Press and wired to newspapers across the country. Two days later in Nevada, McCarthy charged that there were 57 “card-carrying Communists” in the State Department. In testimony before the Senate on February 20, he presented 81 “cases” of treason, most of which came from an old list of past, present, and prospective State Department employees, who had been largely cleared of any meaningful wrongdoing. The Senate resolved to open bipartisan formal hearings on the matter, concluding in June that McCarthy had proved nothing.
McCarthy’s impact and influence, however, only grew. He became synonymous with the issue of communist subversion in government, traveling across the country making accusation after accusation with scant hard evidence to back up his claims. He matched any attack made on his own credibility with an equally harsh attack on his accusers’ loyalty to the United States, a tactic of instant suspicion and paranoia that his critics termed “McCarthyism.”
Senator Joseph McCarthy offers to give reporters a list of State Department employees he says are undergoing a security-loyalty check. (Library of Congress)
As a political force, McCarthy quickly grew indispensable. He attacked the administration of President Harry S. Truman for its failure to stop the communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, specifically singling out Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall, insinuating that Marshall let the takeover go unchecked. One measure of McCarthy’s power came in 1952 when presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower neglected to defend Marshall, who was his commanding officer during World War II. When the Republicans regained control of the Senate that same year, a reelected McCarthy became the chair of the Committee on Government Operations of the Senate and its permanent subcommittee on investigations.
By the end of 1953, McCarthy failed to produce any substantive discovery of treason or domestic subversion within the U. S. government. His charges against the U. S. military provoked a feud that led to the Army-McCar-
THY hearings. Nationally televised for the first time, the hearings allowed the majority of Americans to see McCarthy’s sensational style of interrogation at work rather than just read his statements in the newspaper. The hearings eroded McCarthy’s support. The Republicans lost control of the Senate in the 1954 elections, and in December, the Senate, including 22 Republicans, voted to condemn McCarthy and his behavior. Afterward, he became an outcast in Washington, and he was often the only senator to cast a dissenting vote. His thinly veiled alcoholism grew worse while his shaky health deteriorated, and on May 2, 1957, he died of severe liver disease while still in office.
Further reading: Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983); Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York: Stein & Day, 1982).
—Adam B. Vary
World History
