Patrick Anthony McCarran was born on August 8, 1876 near Reno, Nevada. He was the only child of Patrick and Margaret Shea McCarran, both of whom were Roman Catholic Irish immigrants. The elder McCarran had come to the United States as a stowaway about 1848; he was then sixteen. He joined the United States cavalry, fought the Paiute Indians in Nevada, and then settled there as a homesteader and sheep rancher. Margaret Shea had come from County Cork as a domestic servant.
Young McCarran graduated as valedictorian of Reno High School in 1897 and then attended the University of Nevada. He worked as a janitor to support himself but in his senior year had to quit to help his father, who had suffered a crippling injury. He never received the B. A. , but the University of Nevada eventually awarded him an honorary M. A. in 1931 and an honorary LL. D. in 1941.
For several years McCarran was engaged in farming and sheep-raising, but in his spare time he studied law. His parents had instilled in him ambition, a fighting spirit, and a love of politics; and in 1902 he won a seat in the Nevada legislature and the following year began a long career in public service. McCarran was admitted to the state bar in 1905 and for nearly three decades was active in the Nevada legal community. He first practiced in the mining boom towns of Tonopah and Goldfield, and from 1907 to 1909 was district attorney for Nye County. After returning to Reno, he was elected to the Nevada Supreme Court, serving from 1913 to 1918, the last two years as chief justice. Some of McCarran's more important judicial opinions expanded mining and irrigation law, upheld the rights of defendants, and supported social and economic legislation. McCarran's greatest ambition was to be a United States senator. After two unsuccessful bids (1916, 1926), he was elected in 1932 in the Democratic sweep that carried Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House. His first speech in the Senate in 1933 attacked the administration's attempt to reduce veterans' benefits. Soon he urged an investigation of the National Recovery Administration. In 1937 he became a leader of the opposition to Roosevelt's plan to enlarge the Supreme Court and thus dilute the power of its conservative bloc.
In the postwar period he cosponsored the Reorganization Act of 1945, consolidating a plethora of independent executive agencies, and the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946, which sought to reduce red tape and force the federal bureaucracy to make public many of its procedures. He also worked for the Republican-sponsored income tax reduction bill which President Truman successfully vetoed in 1947. For more than a decade before his death, McCarran was one of the most powerful members of the Senate. More importantly, under the seniority system, in 1943 he became chairman of the Judiciary Committee, through which passed 40 percent of all national legislation, and head of the key Appropriations Subcommittee, which authorized funds for the departments of Commerce, State, and Justice. While the Democrats controlled Congress, these strategic positions gave McCarran enormous power over legislative and executive action.
In keeping with the needs of an isolated state and the defense requirements of the nation, McCarran paid particular attention during his first two terms in office to the development of commercial and military aviation. He advocated a separate and expanded United States air force, and he was the primary sponsor of the 1938 legislation that established the Civil Aeronautics Authority (later Civil Aeronautics Board) as an independent agency to determine commercial airline rates, routings, and safety requirements. He was also responsible for the postwar allocation of $500 million for construction of municipal airfields throughout the country. One of these became McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. An isolationist before Pearl Harbor, he had sought to build America's defenses but keep the country out of the European conflict.
During the 1920's, McCarran conducted the legal battle of the Truckee River Water Users Association, but he became best known as the attorney who in 1920 obtained and successfully defended a Nevada divorce for film star Mary Pickford. He was most commonly known for unsuccessful laboring, passage of a bill that would have ensured full judicial recognition in all other states of the legality of divorces obtained in Nevada. Most importantly, as part of the "silver bloc" in the Senate, he battled with much success to assist the local mining industry, through United States remonetization of silver, government subsidy purchases at almost double the world price, and support for attempts by other nations to maintain currencies based at least in part upon silver. McCarran's greatest fame and significance came as a result of his anti-Communist views and activities, which made him one of the most controversial lawmakers of the Cold War era. A spokesman for a sectional, conservative protest, McCarran became one of the most important right-wing dissenters during the New Deal and the Cold War. McCarran's legacy includes McCarran International Airport, the airport that services Las Vegas, Nevada, as well as McCarran Boulevard, a major street in Reno. McCarran Street, which runs through Las Vegas and some of its suburbs, is also named for McCarran. A statue of McCarran is included in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol. Each state is allowed to display likenesses of two individuals; Nevada's are those of McCarran and Sarah Winnemucca.
Although nominally a Democrat, McCarran's career in the Senate was that of an independent, a lone wolf. He was not a party loyalist and wheelhorse and he soon joined a bipartisan conservative coalition in Congress that opposed many of the centralized, urban-oriented programs of Roosevelt and his successor, Harry S. Truman.
McCarran's philosophy and independence proved popular with many of his constituents, both Republicans and Democrats, and he won reelection without administration support in 1938, 1944, and 1950. In discussing his political philosophy, McCarran liked to recall his football-playing days at the University of Nevada. "My first year, I was left tackle, " he said. "The next year they moved me to right guard, and I have never been left of center since".
During World War II, he voted to end such New Deal agencies as the National Resources Planning Board and the National Youth Administration and to curtail the independence of the Tennessee Valley Authority. His political strength rested on several bases. An able lawyer and skilled parliamentarian, he spoke with familiarity and authority about statutes and procedures.
In the postwar years he opposed much of Truman's foreign policy and urged support of anti-Communist regimes in Spain and China. Advocating closer relations with Generalissimo Francisco Franco, he helped obtain congressional approval for loans, a military alliance, and the construction of American air and naval bases in Spain. A member of the Senate's "China bloc, " he sought unsuccessfully to obtain a $1. 5 billion loan to the Nationalists in 1949. Afterward, McCarran repeatedly charged that the Truman administration had abandoned Chiang Kai-shek and China to the Communists. He favored the proposed Bricker amendment in 1954, which would have restricted the power of the executive branch in foreign policy. As head of the Judiciary Committee and chairman of the special Senate Internal Security Committee, McCarran joined with Senators Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin and William E. Jenner of Indiana in a campaign against alleged Communist subversion within the United States. During the first year of the Korean War he obtained congressional passage, over President Truman's veto, of the Internal Security Act of 1950. This omnibus antisubversive legislation provided for registration of Communists and their organizations, emergency detention of persons believed likely to commit espionage and sabotage, tightening of laws against espionage and sedition, and the establishment of the Subversive Activities Control Board. The act had little legal impact, but did have repressive tendencies. Between 1950 and 1953, McCarran's Internal Security Committee investigated accusations of Communist activities or sympathies made against numerous individuals and groups. McCarran generally supported Senator McCarthy's attacks upon alleged Communists and opposed the 1954 Senate condemnation of the junior senator from Wisconsin, although McCarran died before the vote on the resolution.
In keeping with his belief in the need to protect American society from what he considered subversive infiltration by undesirables, McCarran acted to keep immigration and naturalization policy tightly restrictive. In 1948 he fought against the Truman administration's recommendation to allow several hundred thousand displaced persons from central and eastern Europe to enter the United States. McCarran and other restrictionists argued that increased immigration would produce increased competition for jobs and further radicalism, social disruption, and national weakness. Over Truman's veto, they obtained passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which retained the national-origin system that provided larger quotas for nations of northern and western Europe and which established more rigorous screening of aliens and broader grounds for deportation, in order to eliminate security risks and subversives. Despite accusations that the legislation discriminated against various ethnic groups and made naturalized Americans second-class citizens by holding over them the perpetual threat of deportation, the act remained America's basic immigration law for thirteen years. McCarran's death in Hawthorne, Nev. , removed one of the most powerful and controversial figures on Capitol Hill. A Catholic and a conservative from a rural western state, McCarran was greatly disturbed by many of the changes in America in the middle of the twentieth century particularly the expansion of the federal bureaucracy, the pursuit of urban oriented policies, the liberal direction of foreign affairs, and what he considered the inadequate protection of American institutions against Communist subversion.
Quotations: "I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions which have been made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. America is indeed a joining together of many streams which go to form a mighty river which we call the American way. However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United States. .. . I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation. "
member of the Senate's "China bloc"
The short, heavily built man with the booming voice, flashing blue eyes, and flowing white hair, who listed himself simply as "Pat McCarran" in congressional directories, was widely feared and respected, but he was also known to be warmhearted and intensely loyal to his friends. His chairmanships became patronage levers for building a powerful personal political organization in both Washington and his home state. McCarran never forgot the needs of Nevada. He aided many of the state's young lawyers and he worked tirelessly for irrigation projects and for aid to the state's livestock industry. McCarran's impassioned oratory on the metal's behalf led to his being called "silver-haired, silver-tongued, and silver-minded. "
In 1903 McCarran married Martha Harriet Weeks, the schoolteacher daughter of a well-to-do Episcopalian ranching family from Elko, Nevada. They had five children.
