The first person to stand up to McCarthy was a woman

In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin gave a speech to the Republican Women’s Club in West Virginia in which he claimed to have a list of 205 Communists working in the State Department. The speech tapped a Cold War fever and the media firestorm that followed it surprised even McCarthy; he was so taken aback that he would frequently change the number of supposed Communists depending on who was asking. He was, of course, making it all up.

McCarthy’s accusations would lead to the Tydings Committee investigations, a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. This would snowball into hysteria, homophobia, blacklists, and the suppression of free speech that we all know McCarthy for. He would be censured eventually, in December 1954, after ruining countless lives and going after the Army in the televised hearings that gave us this famous moment:

It took four years for the men of the United States Senate to stand up to one bully with a severe drinking problem (he would eventually die of it at age 48). But it took a woman from Maine, the first woman to ever serve in both the House and the Senate, only four months: Margaret Chase Smith.