Senator Joseph McCarthy did not create the national obsession with communist subversion. It had arisen in the late 1930s, years before McCarthy had come to public notice. Angry that they had been barred from the corridors of power for 20 years, conservative Republicans used everything they could to discredit the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Opponents of the New Deal were not always scrupulously careful to distinguish between liberals and Communists and used anti-communism as a way to attack labor unions and liberal social programs.