After the War ended, the consolidation of Eastern Europe under the influence of the Soviet Union, the success of the communists in mainland China in 1949, and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 stimulated a fierce anti-communist backlash in the United States. Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), head of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Internal Security Subcommittee, initiated an investigation of the administrations of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to search for communist infiltration. He promoted the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which required American Communist Party members to register with the Attorney General. Title II of this Act used the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans as a precedent for rounding up alleged subversives under "loyalty clearance programs."

 

Two years after passage of the McCarran Internal Security Act, Senator McCarran and Congressman Francis Walter (D-PA), who would become chairman of the Committee on Un-American Activities in the late 1950s, teamed up to write the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act. Like McCarran's previous efforts, the legislation contained provisions aimed at "subversion". In this case, it permitted the exclusion or deportation of any alien who engaged or had purpose to engage in activities prejudicial to the public interest or subversive to national security. Although the exclusion or deportation of aliens on purely ideological grounds was not a new concept in immigration law, the modern adaptation of this practice in the 1952 Act would have a lasting effect. Despite a repeal of most ideological grounds for deportation by Congress in 1990, provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act have been used as recently as 2002 in the ongoing deportation cases against two Palestinian activists who as students distributed magazines and raised funds for a group the government later designated as a terrorist organization.

 

1950 - won re-election to 4th term with 58% of popular vote, especially federal employees
1950/09/23 - passed Internal Security Act that required all communist-front organizations to register with the Attorney-General, prohibited communists for working in defense industries, prohibited immigration of any member of a totalitarian organization, allowed internment of communists in case of national emergency.

1950/12 - became chairman of new Senate Internal Security subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee:

• McCarran's subcommittee held hearings on "loss" of China from July '51 to June '52, using files of the Institute of Pacific Relations seized by the subcommittee from Edward Carter's barn in Lee, Massachusetts, in Feb. 1951. Some of those named in the hearings would prove to be spies, such as Frederick V. Field who had also been named by Elizabeth Bentley. Most of the others who were named were not spies and suffered from unproven accusations, such as Prof. John K. Fairbank of Harvard.
• the subcommittee also investigated unions, contributing to the expulsion of 1900 from the CIO for alleged communist activities

1952/06/30 - passed McCarran-Walter Act that revised immigration laws to admit more Asians (was pro-Nationalist China) but not "subversives", and allowed Attorney-General to deport subversives even after becoming citizens
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/20th/mccarran.html

 

"Years before Joe McCarthy ever opened his mouth in public," writes Ybarra, "McCarran believed -- really believed -- that the Democratic Party was controlled by the Communists and that one mysterious person especially had managed to exert a malign influence that could be felt at the highest levels of government." He once told a friend, "If I . . . eventually find that one, I will have served my country well."

The senator's early years gave no hint of the direction his life would take. The son of illiterate Irish immigrants, he started out as a populist, the law partner of a socialist and a friend of the working class. Correctly viewed as an outsider in Nevada's feudal political circles, he had a painfully sluggish beginning in politics. Once elected as a Democrat, he maintained just enough party allegiance to keep federal boondoggles coming to Nevada. In 1944, he became chairman of the Judiciary Committee and thereby one of the most powerful men in Washington. Four of every 10 bills had to go through his committee. He also controlled the subcommittee handling budgets for the State and Justice departments.

He ruled like a sultan. One year he cut State Department funds by $20 million because it circulated Herblock cartoons ridiculing him. He used FBI agents as chauffeurs and tourist guides for his wife and five children. The senator was apparently too powerful to be indicted even though he clearly committed perjury when, despite wiretap evidence to the contrary, he repeatedly swore he had never dealt with mobster Bugsy Siegel. There were serious stories of McCarran's being paid off at fixed roulette tables for blocking a federal tax on gambling.

"From the oversized chair in the Judiciary Committee room," writes Ybarra, "McCarran ran a virtual government-in-opposition, even while his own party controlled the White House and both wings of the Capitol," and he used his power ruthlessly. He turned Truman's attorneys general into puppets, driving the president into such a rage that he declared Nevada was a meaningless "hell on earth" that "should never have been made a state." He had a point. McCarran represented the least populated state in the nation. He needed only a piddling 35,000 votes to be elected, yet Senate rules gave him the power to cripple major portions of the federal government and shred the Constitution.

Laws that McCarran wrote and pushed through Congress made it easy to fire federal employees without telling them why or giving them a way to appeal and set up concentration camps in this country for imprisoning left-wing dissidents during "emergencies." With the end of World War II, there were seven million Europeans homeless and adrift. McCarran considered all immigrants to be potential spies, and he hated Jews. Using the McCarran-Walters Immigration Act and his Internal Security Act of 1950 to tighten immigration, he limited the number of refugees to only half a million over a two-year period -- fewer than 10,000 were Jews.

In 1951 McCarran created the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee "to investigate subversive activities" and named himself chairman. Although the House Un-American Activities Committee got much more publicity, the SISS was a goon squad, "the most fearsome of the congressional investigating committees in mid-twentieth century America." In 1954, McCarran keeled over dead from a heart attack in the middle of a political gathering. Thousands, including seven conservative senators, were there for his funeral in Nevada and for the valedictory speeches that followed. Sen. Styles Bridges, who had been McCarran's point man in many a witch hunt, said: "Any person with a personality can acquire friends, but only great men with the characteristics of Pat McCarran acquire enemies. I admire him for a great many things, not the least of which was the cluster of enemies he had."

It was a rather large cluster. Perhaps speaking for it was a local reporter attending the same event. Ybarra tells us he grumbled, "McCarran was a son of a bitch alive and he's a son of a bitch dead."   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1586420658/002-2057259-3153664?v=glance

You can find out even more about the man who actually began and ran the period known as the "McCarthy era" here:

http://www.factbites.com/topics/McCarran-Internal-Security-Act

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