Profile · Appleton, Wisconsin
Joseph Raymond McCarthy
Born Grand Chute Township, Outagamie County, Nov. 14, 1908; Outagamie circuit judge; U.S. senator 1947–57; buried St. Mary’s Parish Cemetery, Appleton
$172,623.18
Joseph Raymond McCarthy was the Wisconsin Republican whose anti-Communist crusade made his name a lasting word in American politics. Born on a Grand Chute Township farm in Outagamie County on November 14, 1908—the fourth of seven children of Timothy and Bridget Tierney McCarthy, by the Wisconsin Historical Society count—he quit school at fourteen, raised chickens until flu and a market crash ended the flock, and clerked at Appleton’s Cash-Way grocery until the chain made him manager of the Manawa store. At twenty he talked his way into Little Wolf High School, finished four years’ work in nine months with principal A.D. Hershberger’s certification so Marquette would take him, and earned a law degree while still managing the store. He served as Outagamie circuit judge, then as a Marine, before beating Robert M. La Follette Jr. in the 1946 Republican primary and taking a U.S. Senate seat. On February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to hold a list of Communists in the State Department; the number moved from speech to speech, but the hearings that followed did not. The Army–McCarthy spectacle of 1954 ended with the Senate’s censure that December. He died on May 2, 1957, at Bethesda Naval Hospital at forty-eight. The death certificate cited acute hepatitis; biographers have long written about alcohol. More than 17,000 people filed through St. Mary’s in Appleton before burial at St. Mary’s Parish Cemetery. Grand Chute is the township that wraps the city; Appleton is the grocery, the judgeship, and the grave.