Tydings Committee

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The Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, more commonly referred to as the Tydings Committee, was a subcommittee authorized by S. Res. 231, 81st Congress in February of 1950 to look into charges by Joseph R. McCarthy that he had a list of names of individuals known by the Secretary of State to be members of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and who were still working in the State Department.

The mandate of the committee was to conduct "a full and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or have been, employed by the Department of State." The chairman of the subcommittee was Senator Millard Tydings, a Democrat from Maryland.

During a marathon 6-hour speech, McCarthy declined requests that he disclose the actual names of the people on his list. Four times during McCarthy's February 20 speech, Democratic Senator Scott W. Lucas demanded McCarthy make the 81 names public, but McCarthy refused to do so, saying: "If I were to give all the names involved, it might leave a wrong impression. If we should label one man a Communist when he is not a Communist, I think it would be too bad." In fact, McCarthy had no actual names; his evidence for this particular list came from summaries of State Department loyalty review files, from which the names had been removed.^[1] Eventually, McCarthy moved on from his original list of unnamed individuals and used the hearings to make charges against ten others for whom he had names: Dorothy Kenyon, Esther and Stephen Brunauer, Haldore Hanson, Gustavo Duran, Owen Lattimore, Harlow Shapley, Frederick Schuman, John S. Service and Philip Jessup. Some of these people no longer, or never had, worked for the State Department, and all had previously been the subject of various charges of varying worth and validity. Owen Lattimore became a particular focus of McCarthy's, who at one point described him as a "top Russian spy."^[2] Throughout the hearings, McCarthy had colorful rhetoric, but no substantial evidence, to support his accusations.

From its beginning, the Tydings Committee was marked by partisan infighting. Its final report, written by the Democratic majority, concluded that the individuals on McCarthy's list were neither Communists nor pro-communist, and said the State Department had an effective security program. Tydings labeled McCarthy's charges a "fraud and a hoax," and said that the result of McCarthy's actions was to "confuse and divide the American people[...] to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves." Republicans responded in kind, with William Jenner stating that Tydings was guilty of "the most brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history." The full Senate voted three times on whether to accept the report, and each time the voting was precisely divided along party lines.^[1]

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