I am not old enough to state this with confidence, but I strongly suspect that a large minority, if not the majority, of people were in favour of McCarthyism in

I am not old enough to state this with confidence, but I strongly suspect that a large minority, if not the majority, of people were in favour of McCarthyism in order to root out those awful communists. People are surprisingly unimaginative and just don't see how it could be turned on them.