WHEELING, W.Va. — On Feb. 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy disembarked from his Capital Airlines plane at Stifel Field here, where he planned to speak at a Lincoln Day event hosted by the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club.

At the McLure Hotel downtown that night, Joe McCarthy, a 41-year-old junior Republican senator from Wisconsin, gave one of the most infamous speeches in American history, mixing right-wing demagogy and outright lies as he claimed that there were hundreds of Communists burrowed deep in the State Department and accused President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration of refusing to weed them out.

His speech electrified a crowd of 275 in the McLure’s Colonnade ballroom and transformed him into a frightening national force. Mr. McCarthy blamed “elite” Democrats in the Truman administration, particularly Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who he said had failed to purge “the enemy within” that threatened America’s security and way of life: “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy in the State Department.”

By today’s standards, the news of Mr. McCarthy’s speech spread across the nation at a glacial pace. Only the local newspaper and radio station covered it (the radio station later mistakenly erased the only tape recording of the speech). It gained national notice because of a 110-word Associated Press story picked up by about two dozen newspapers around the country.