Joseph McCarthy sought to identify members of the Communist party in high ranking government jobs. He compiled a list of 200 names he believed were Communist with little evidence. He began trials that often ruined careers and reputations of those listed.

The McCarthy and HUAC hearings were the key elements of the second Red Scare, rooted largely in the 1950s, which focused on investigating Communist Party members in America.  None of the other answer choices feature parties that were very active during the 1950s, providing another clue and an ability to eliminate certain answer choices.

 The Watergate Scandal focused on the breaking and entering of Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Office Complex in Washington, DC, on June 17, 1972.  In particular, investigations looked into President Nixon’s own involvement and the administration’s cover up of the break in.  In 1975, Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency instead of being impeached by the United States Congress.

The 1960 Campaign featured the first Presidential Debate to be televised to a national audience, and led to speculation as to the effect of television on campaigns.  Personal campaigning and primaries both were innovations of the 1890s, while Conventions predate the Civil War by decades.  Negative campaigning is as old as democracy itself, and goes back to antiquity.

Sixteenth Amendment. For much of its early history the United States government collected finances mostly through custom duties and excise taxes. Income tax was generally viewed as an unconstituional incursion on the right of individuals to acquire wealth. However, during the cash-strapped years of the Civil War the Republican goverment levied a three-percent income tax. It proved to be extremely lucrative and after it was repealed in 1872, many Populist and Socialist movements began to demand a graduated income tax. The movement picked up momentum when the Democratic Party adopted it to its platform in 1908, and the Sixteenth Amendment was adopted into the Consitution in 1909 allowing the United States government to collect an income tax without regard to how the money was earned or a need to parcel the money out to the States. It represents a major extension of Federal power in the Twentieth Century. 

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election caused a major restructuring of the American political landscape, bringing many groups into the Republican column that had previously been strongly Democratic.  This restructuring also firmed up many Democratic voters.  Particularly key to Reagan’s victory were conservative Christian voters, while all the other groups listed became firmly Democratic.

On January 20th, 1961, John F. Kennedy delivered this famous inaugural address in Washington.

William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. His killer was convicted and sentenced to death, even though his political motives are still unclear. 

In the 1936 election the incumbent Democratic candidate, Franklin Roosevelt, defeated the Republican challenger, Herbert Hoover, in a landslide. Roosevelt received a great deal of popular support from, amongst others, the urban poor, farmers, the unemployed, African Americans (who had previously traditionally voted Republican), Catholics, and Progressives. Roosevelt’s policies had generally endeared him to the working and middle classes, but his policies generally angered the wealthy, who found their income heavily taxed—as much as seventy-five percent—under Roosevelt’s new graduated income tax.

Jeanette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress, from the state of Montana in 1916. Rankin was a prominent member of the female suffrage movement in the early Twentieth Century and helped achieve full voting rights for women in both Montana and Washington. Like many influential women of her time, Rankin believed that the corruption and backwardness of American politics was a result of the lack of feminine participation in government. Aside from her position as a champion of female rights, Rankin is also well known for being a dedicated pacifist—she was the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Rankin actually achieved her position in Congress before women had full suffrage rights in the United States (1920). At the moment of her election, in 1916, women were voting in several different forms in the majority of American states.