Tydings+Committee

=__Tydings Committee__=

Millard Tydings Millard E. Tydings;http://www.lib.umd.edu/univarchives/macmil/imgpg/tydings.html

The Tydings Committee, as it soon became known, was a subcommittee under the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which was set up in February of 1950. Their job was to do "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 group's main focus was to see how factual and rational McCarthy's accusations were. Senator Millard E. Tydings, a Democrat, was the Chairman of this important committee. From its founding, the Tydings Committee was marked by disputes and fights between the Republican and Democratic parties.

The final report written by the Democrats (the Republicans refused to take part) stated that the people on McCarthy's "guilty" list were neither Communists nor pro-Communists. The Democrats on the committee labeled the charges by McCarthy both a "fraud and a hoax," and said that what McCarthy was trying to accomplish was to confuse and split the American people. The Republicans, on the other hand, thought that Tydings had committed the worst form of treason our country had ever seen by denying that there were communists working in the government. The entire Senate voted three times on whether or not to accept the report, each time the results being split among party lines. In the end, the report passed and McCarthy was censured by the Senate.