When Herblock’s man in the street queries a fellow citizen about Joseph Stalin and the 1950 election campaigns, he alludes to the likely influence of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade on the mid-term elections. McCarthy had won national attention with his speech on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he repeatedly mentioned Stalin in the “war between two diametrically opposed ideologies” and charged that 205 communists had infiltrated the State Department.