Army during which he badgered and berated a witness, Brigadier General Ralph W. From this high-profile post, McCarthy launched more investigations to root out communist traitors, including a televised 1954 inquiry into the U.S. In 1953, with a Republican president in the White House, McCarthy was named chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations. Even when an investigation failed to produce any evidence, McCarthy stayed on the attack and capitalized on Cold War fears to accuse political foes of disloyalty. In 1950, McCarthy claimed to have the names of 205 communists actively working in the U.S. In the anxious early days of the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was an aggressive attack dog against what he believed was a communist infiltration of the U.S. McCarthy during the McCarthy investigations, trying to prove the existence of Communist subversion in high government circles, 1954. A Lame-Duck Senate Censured Joseph McCarthy And as Harrison hoped, Cleveland largely took the blame. The crash quickly devolved into the Panic of 1893, a severe economic depression that lasted until 1897. The result was a stock market crash with only eight days left before Cleveland’s inauguration. Treasury burned through a surplus and refused to bail out Wall Street financiers. economy, and now with only four months left in his lame-duck presidency, Harrison decided to torpedo the economy himself so it would appear to be Cleveland’s fault.Īs historian Heather Cox Richardson explains, Republican-owned newspapers ran doomsday editorials to scare off foreign investment, while the U.S. Harrison and the Republicans had campaigned on the threat that electing Cleveland and the Democrats would sink the U.S. But instead of guaranteeing a Republican victory in the 1892 election, there was a backlash, with voters overwhelmingly sending Cleveland back to the White House and flipping Congress to the Democrats. Benjamin Harrison Torpedoed the Economy to Punish ClevelandĪfter Benjamin Harrison squeaked out a narrow Electoral College victory against incumbent President Grover Cleveland in 1888, Harrison and his Republican backers in Congress rushed to add six new Western states to the Union and pack them with Republican loyalists. He didn’t conceive of the federal government having the power to stop the states.”īy the time Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861, the secessionist states had already formed the Confederate States of America and Civil War was all but assured. “Like Hoover, Buchanan was limited in his concept of what government could do. “I don’t think that history is fair to Buchanan,” says Daniel Franklin, an associate professor emeritus of political science at Georgia State University and author of Pitiful Giants: Presidents in their Final Terms. But when the Star of the West was fired upon and blocked from entering the harbor, Buchanan folded. When South Carolinian troops surrounded Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, Buchanan sent an unarmed vessel, the Star of the West, to provide reinforcements for the U.S. He knew that secession was illegal, but he also believed that the Constitution barred him from sending in federal soldiers to quash the rebellion. The greater blame for the secession crisis was, as Buchanan saw it, “the long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern states.”Īfter South Carolina and six other states formally seceded in December 1860 and January 1861, Buchanan was in a tough spot. In his December 1860 State of the Union Address, Buchanan said that “the antecedents of the President-elect have been sufficient to justify the fears of the South that he will attempt to invade their constitutional rights,” although Buchanan didn’t believe Lincoln would act so hastily. President James Buchanan, a lame duck with a Cabinet full of Southerners, chose to blame Lincoln and Northern abolitionists for the division over slavery rather than take a hard line against Southern secession. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November of 1860, slave-owning states led by South Carolina made clear their intentions to secede from the Union rather than make concessions with the incoming Republican administration. James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States, c.
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