page_title: George Shaw Wheeler
section_title: McCarthy and other allegations
hierarchical_section_title: George Shaw Wheeler / Career / McCarthy and other allegations
caption_attribution_description: English: Sen. Joseph McCarthy chats with his attorney Roy Cohn during Senate Subcommittee hearings on the McCarthy-Army dispute
context_page_description: George Shaw Wheeler was an American economist and advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, best known for being the first American to defect over the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia in November 1947. Wheeler's defection inspired his friend Noel Field to do likewise the following year in 1949 and also US Senator Joseph McCarthy cited Wheeler's name when accusing US President Harry S. Truman of "Trumanism," i.e., "the placing of your political party above the interest of the country," specifically when it came to promoting alleged Communist spy Harry Dexter White and others.
context_section_description: In a speech on November 24, 1953, broadcast on radio and television, US Senator Joseph McCarthy cited Wheeler as an example of how the New Deal government was "crawling with communists" (a week after US Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. had questioned Truman's role in promoting the late Harry Dexter White). He chastised then US Senator Truman for intervening and stopping the dismissal of Wheeler from government service.  McCarthy then questioned why another American official who had served in Germany, John Paton Davies Jr., also questioned by a loyalty board, was still in government.  Newspapers reported that "Democrats interpret the Wheeler reference, therefore, as a carefully veiled warning to Ike", in that then General Dwight Eisenhower was still based in Germany at the time.  The Eisenhower Administration saw the Wheeler mention as an attack on the President as well as General Clay.  They also noted that the speech placed McCarthy in a position of "wide and nearly implacable opposition to President Eisenhower."
  On April 24, 1954, United States Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell told the US House Appropriations Committee that his department had dismissed five employees for "falsifying their job applications" and another 17 with "unfavorable information in their files were allowed to resign." During the same hearing, US Representative Fred E. Busbey stated that Under Secretary David A. Morse "once helped to get a loyalty clearance for a Federal employe who later "went behind the Iron Curtain to join the Communists."  Busbey named that person as "John Shaw Wheeler", but the New York Times corrected by stating "Busbey apparently referred to the case of George Shaw Wheeler.
  In 1954, the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences hired Wheeler as an economist and writer.
  On April 21, 1959, during testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), labor leader Harry Bridges stated that he had met twice with Wheeler in Czechoslovakia.  Bridges had known Wheeler and his wife earlier, when they both worked at the Cooperative Bookshop.  He did not know how Wheeler had come to know of his visit to the country.  He reported that Wheeler was "teaching at the university."  Bridges claimed to have no knowledge of his citizenship status.
caption: Joseph McCarthy invoked Wheeler's defection in his attacks on former US President Harry Truman (here, McCarthy chats with Roy Cohn during Army-McCarthy hearings)
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