Songfacts®:

• Senator Joseph McCarthy was a Republican politician who in 1950 caused a sensation by claiming to hold a list of about 200 communists working in the State Department. He continued a 'witch-hunting' campaign until the enquiries against these officials were halted in 1954, when it was shown that McCarthy and his aides had been falsifying evidence. By this time, however, many thousands of people in public life and the arts had been blacklisted as suspected Communists or communist sympathizers.
• Included in the song is a sound clip of the head attorney for the United States Army, Joseph Welch, rebuking Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy Hearings.
• The typewriter heard at the beginning of this song was the very same machine on which Michael Stipe wrote all of Document's lyrics. Document was the band's first platinum album. In 2006, it was voted 49th in a Q readers' poll of the "Best Albums Ever." >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Edward Pearce - Ashford, Kent, England, for all above