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"McCarthy’s anti-Communist purges helped positivism to triumph over pragmatism in American universities in the 1950’s."

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Capps, J. (2018). McCarthyism and American Philosophy | Issue 46 | Philosophy Now. [online] Philosophynow.org. Available at: https://philosophynow.org/issues/46/McCarthyism_and_American_Philosophy [Accessed 16 May 2018].

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McCarthyism and American Philosophy | Issue 46 | Philosophy Now

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John Capps argues that Senator McCarthy's anti-Communist purges helped positivism to triumph over pragmatism in American universities in the 1950's.

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"McCarthy era that set the precedent for these actions."

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"the discrimination of all immigrants, very recently immigrants from Mexico, can also be classified as neo-McCarthyism. The classification of a certain people, whether it is communists, Muslims, Jews, or Mexicans "

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"Phone tapping and illegal means of interrogation are two issues that clearly have allusions to McCarthyism and unquestionably forfeit civil rights. "

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"people of Middle Eastern descent and people from that region are being persecuted in this post 9/11 mindset."

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"The method of accusing without evidence is exemplified by the actions of the present politicians. "

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"McCarthyism is still alive in the United States, only in more subtle forms."

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"In 1954, Edward R. Murrow, a very well respected and popular news journalist, ran a report on his program, See It Now" - this is a possible primary source

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"Many people supported McCarthyism because of the tactics used my McCarthy to scare the general public."

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McCarthy and American Culture (not a primary resource)

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McCarthy and American Culture (not a primary resource)

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W., J. (2018). McCarthyism and American Culture | Teen Opinion Essay | Teen Ink. [online] Teenink.com. Available at: http://www.teenink.com/opinion/all/article/30497/McCarthyism-and-American-Culture/ [Accessed 16 May 2018].

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McCarthyism and American Culture | Teen Opinion Essay | Teen Ink

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The threat of communism in the 1950's was an ominous one. The department of the government called

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"Individuals who refused to answer the committee’s questions or to provide names could be indicted for contempt of Congress and sent to prison. "

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"after 1947, HUAC assumed new heights of prominence and notoriety, and the committee conducted a series of high-profile hearings alleging that Communists disloyal to the U.S. had infiltrated government, schools, the entertainment industry and many other areas of American life."

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"This intimidating atmosphere often produced dramatic but questionable revelations about Communists infiltrating American institutions and subversive actions by well-known citizens."

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"called citizens to testify in high-profile hearings before Congress"

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" a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, investigated allegations of communist activity in the U.S. during the early years of the Cold War (1945-91)"

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HUAC- House of Un-American Committee (not a primary resource)

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HUAC- House of Un-American Committee (not a primary resource)

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HISTORY.com. (2018). HUAC - Cold War - HISTORY.com. [online] Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/huac [Accessed 14 May 2018].

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Table of Contents

1. The Cold War: Investigating the Red Menace

2. Subpoenas and Blacklists

3. Targeting Hollywood and Alger Hiss

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, investigated allegations of communist activity in the U.S. during the early years of the Cold War (1945-91). Established in 1938, the committee wielded its subpoena power as a weapon and called citizens to testify in high-profile hearings before Congress. This intimidating atmosphere often produced dramatic but questionable revelations about Communists infiltrating American institutions and subversive actions by well-known citizens. HUAC's controversial tactics contributed to the fear, distrust and repression that existed during the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, HUAC's influence was in decline, and in 1969 it was renamed the Committee on Internal Security. Although it ceased issuing subpoenas that year, its operations continued until 1975.

The Cold War: Investigating the Red Menace

Upon its formation in 1938, the official role of the House Un-American Activities Committee was to investigate Communist and fascist organizations that had become active during the Great Depression, though it also examined the activities of other groups on the political left. From the outset, the committee proved to be a source of political discord. Its defenders argued it uncovered vital information that bolstered national security, while critics charged it was a partisan tool bent on discrediting the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945).

Did you know? One of the members of HUAC in the late 1940s was a first-term U.S. representative from California named Richard Nixon. Nixon played a prominent role in the Alger Hiss spy hearings in 1948; 20 years later, he was elected the 37th president of the United States.

As tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union intensified following World War II (1939-45), the committee took up its investigations of communist activities with new vigor. Particularly after 1947, HUAC assumed new heights of prominence and notoriety, and the committee conducted a series of high-profile hearings alleging that Communists disloyal to the U.S. had infiltrated government, schools, the entertainment industry and many other areas of American life.

Subpoenas and Blacklists

The committee employed several controversial methods to accomplish its goal of ferreting out suspected Communists. Typically, an individual who raised the suspicions of HUAC received a subpoena to appear before the committee. During the hearing, the suspected Communist was grilled about his or her political beliefs and activities and then asked to provide the names of other people who had taken part in allegedly subversive activities. Any additional figures identified in this manner also received subpoenas, widening the committee's probe.

Individuals who refused to answer the committee's questions or to provide names could be indicted for contempt of Congress and sent to prison. Subjects of HUAC investigations had the option of invoking their right to avoid self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment, but "pleading the Fifth" created the impression that they were guilty of a crime. In addition, those who refused to cooperate were often blacklisted by their employers. They lost their jobs and were effectively prevented from working in their chosen industry.

Critics claimed that HUAC's tactics amounted to a witch hunt that trampled on citizens' rights and ruined their careers and reputations. These critics argued that most people who were called before the committee had broken no laws, but instead were targeted for their political beliefs or for exercising their right to free speech. Supporters of the committee, on the other hand, believed that its efforts were justified given the grave threat to U.S. security posed by communism.

Targeting Hollywood and Alger Hiss

The HUAC investigations delved into many areas of American life, but they paid special attention to the motion picture industry, which was believed to harbor a large number of Communists. Not wishing to get on the wrong side of Congress or the movie-going public, most film industry executives did not speak out against the investigations. In addition, many of the major studios imposed a strict blacklist policy against actors, directors, writers and other personnel implicated in Communist activity.

The film industry investigations reached their peak with the events surrounding the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors who were called to testify in October 1947. The all-male group of screenwriters, producers and directors (Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Larson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo) refused to cooperate with the investigation and used their HUAC appearances to denounce the committee's tactics. All were cited for contempt of Congress and sentenced to prison terms, in addition to being blacklisted from working in Hollywood.

HUAC also sounded an alarm about Communists infiltrating the federal government. The most infamous case began in August 1948, when a self-confessed former member of the American Communist Party named Whittaker Chambers (1901-61) appeared before the committee. During his dramatic testimony, Chambers accused Alger Hiss (1904-96), a former high-ranking State Department official, of serving as a spy for the Soviet Union. Based on allegations and evidence provided by Chambers, Hiss was found guilty of perjury and served 44 months in prison. He spent the rest of his life proclaiming his innocence and decrying his wrongful prosecution.

Hiss' conviction bolstered claims that HUAC was performing a valuable service to the nation by uncovering Communist espionage. The suggestion that Communist agents had infiltrated senior levels of the U.S. government also added to the widespread fear that "Reds" (a term derived from the red Soviet flag) posed a serious threat to the nation. HUAC's work served as a blueprint for the tactics employed by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. McCarthy led an aggressive anticommunist campaign of his own that made him a powerful and feared figure in American politics. His reign of terror came to an end in 1954, when the news media revealed his unethical tactics and he was censured by his colleagues in Congress.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, HUAC's relevance was in decline, and in 1969, it was renamed the Committee on Internal Security. Although it ceased issuing subpoenas that year, its operations continued until 1975.

Fact Check

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HUAC - Definition, Hearings & Investigations

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The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that investigated allegations of communist activity in the U.S. during the early years of the Cold War (1945-91). It was abolished in 1975.

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"it is clear that the threat of espionage was real. So too, however, was repression in the name of catching spies. "

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"For two people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, espionage charges resulted in execution. "

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"Many thousands of Americans faced congressional committee hearings, FBI investigations, loyalty tests, and sedition laws; negative judgments in those arenas brought consequences ranging from imprisonment to deportation, loss of passport, or, most commonly, long-term unemployment."

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" “McCarthyism” remains an apt label for the demagogic tactic of undermining political opponents by making unsubstantiated attacks on their loyalty to the United States. "

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McCarthyism and the (second) Red Scare (not a primary resource)

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McCarthyism and the (second) Red Scare (not a primary resource)

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PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, AMERICAN HISTORY (americanhistory.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 11 May 2018

Summary and Keywords

The second Red Scare refers to the fear of communism that permeated American politics, culture, and society from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the opening phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This episode of political repression lasted longer and was more pervasive than the Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I. Popularly known as "McCarthyism" after Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), who made himself famous in 1950 by claiming that large numbers of Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, the second Red Scare predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single maverick politician. Nonetheless, "McCarthyism" became the label for the tactic of undermining political opponents by making unsubstantiated attacks on their loyalty to the United States.

The initial infrastructure for waging war on domestic communism was built during the first Red Scare, with the creation of an antiradicalism division within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the emergence of a network of private "patriotic" organizations. With capitalism's crisis during the Great Depression, the Communist Party grew in numbers and influence, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program expanded the federal government's role in providing economic security. The anticommunist network expanded as well, most notably with the 1938 formation of the Special House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, which in 1945 became the permanent House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Other key congressional investigation committees were the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Members of these committees and their staff cooperated with the FBI to identify and pursue alleged subversives. The federal employee loyalty program, formalized in 1947 by President Harry Truman in response to right-wing allegations that his administration harbored Communist spies, soon was imitated by local and state governments as well as private employers. As the Soviets' development of nuclear capability, a series of espionage cases, and the Korean War enhanced the credibility of anticommunists, the Red Scare metastasized from the arena of government employment into labor unions, higher education, the professions, the media, and party politics at all levels. The second Red Scare did not involve pogroms or gulags, but the fear of unemployment was a powerful tool for stifling criticism of the status quo, whether in economic policy or social relations. Ostensibly seeking to protect democracy by eliminating communism from American life, anticommunist crusaders ironically undermined democracy by suppressing the expression of dissent. Debates over the second Red Scare remain lively because they resonate with ongoing struggles to reconcile Americans' desires for security and liberty.

Keywords: anticommunism, communism, Martin Dies, Federal Bureau of Investigation, federal loyalty program, J. Edgar Hoover, House Un-American Activities Committee, Joseph McCarthy, political repression, Red Scare

The second Red Scare refers to the anticommunist fervor that permeated American politics, society, and culture from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the opening phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This episode lasted longer and was more pervasive than the first Red Scare, which followed World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Popularly known as "McCarthyism" after Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), who made himself famous in 1950 by claiming that large numbers of Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, the second Red Scare in fact predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single politician. "McCarthyism" remains an apt label for the demagogic tactic of undermining political opponents by making unsubstantiated attacks on their loyalty to the United States. But that term is too narrow to capture the complex origins, diverse manifestations, and sprawling cast of characters involved in the multidimensional conflict that was the second Red Scare. Defining the American Communist Party as a serious threat to national security, government and nongovernment actors at national, state, and local levels developed a range of mechanisms for identifying and punishing Communists and their alleged sympathizers. For two people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, espionage charges resulted in execution. Many thousands of Americans faced congressional committee hearings, FBI investigations, loyalty tests, and sedition laws; negative judgements in those arenas brought consequences ranging from imprisonment to deportation, loss of passport, or, most commonly, long-term unemployment.

Interpretations of the second Red Scare have ranged between two poles, one emphasizing the threat posed to national security by the Communist Party and the other emphasizing the threat to democracy posed by political repression. In the 1990s, newly accessible Soviet and U.S. intelligence sources revealed that more than three hundred American Communists-some Manhattan Project technicians and other government employees among them-indeed did pass information to the Soviets, chiefly during World War II. Scholars disagree about whether all these people understood themselves to be engaged in espionage and about how much damage they did to national security, but it is clear that the threat of espionage was real. So too, however, was repression in the name of catching spies. The second Red Scare remains a hotly debated topic because Americans continue to differ on the optimal balance between security and liberty and how to achieve it.

The American Communist Party

The Formation of an Anticommunist Coalition

Anticommunists were less unified than their adversary; diverse constituencies mobilized against communism at different moments.

During the violent industrial conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, employers and employer associations frequently avoided acknowledging workers' grievances, by charging that foreign-born radicals were fomenting revolution. Employers often enlisted local law officers and private detectives in their efforts to quell labor militancy, which they cast as unpatriotic.

The Federal Loyalty Program

The Roosevelt administration and its supporters dismissed Dies and his ilk as fanatics, but in 1946 accusations that Communists had infiltrated government agencies began to get traction. Public anxiety about postwar inflation and another strike wave was intensified by Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe and by Russian defector Igor Gouzenko's exposure of a Canadian spy ring. Highlighting the "Communists in government" issue helped the Republican Party make sweeping gains in the 1946 midterm elections, leading President Harry Truman to formalize and expand the makeshift wartime loyalty program.

Loyalty standards tightened as the political terrain shifted. During the summer of 1948, the ex-Communists Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers testified before HUAC that in the 1930s and early 1940s they had managed Washington spy rings that included dozens of government officials, including the former State Department aide Alger Hiss. A Harvard Law School graduate who had been involved in the formation of the United Nations, Hiss vigorously denied the allegations, and Truman officials defended him. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950. Meanwhile, the Soviets developed nuclear capability sooner than expected, Communists took control in China, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted, and North Korea invaded South Korea. This combination of events increased the Truman administration's vulnerability to partisan attacks. Senator McCarthy claimed to explain those events by alleging that Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department. Congress then in effect broadened the loyalty program by passing Public Law 733, which empowered heads of sensitive agencies to dismiss an employee on security grounds. An employee deemed loyal could nonetheless be labeled a security risk because of personal circumstances (alcoholism, homosexuality, a Communist relative) that were perceived to create vulnerability to coercion. A purge of homosexuals from the State Department and other agencies ensued. Over Truman's veto, in 1950 Congress also passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required Communist organizations to register with the U.S. attorney general and created the Subversive Activities Control Board. The new Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by Patrick McCarran (D-Nevada), was soon vying with HUAC for headlines about the battle against Communists on the home front. After McCarthy claimed the loyalty program was clearing too-many employees on appeal, Truman's Executive Order 10241 of April 1951 lowered the standard of evidence required for dismissal. That same month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the loyalty program's constitutionality, a reminder that all three branches of government built the scaffolding for the Red Scare. The standards changed again in April 1953 with Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450, which extended the security risk standard to every civil service job, imposed more-stringent "morals" tests, and eliminated defendants' right to a hearing. It was not unusual for a career civil servant to be investigated under the Hatch Act during World War II and then again after each executive order. Of the more than 9,300 employees who were cleared after full investigation under the 1947 standard, for example, at least 2,756 saw their cases reopened under the 1951 standard. Employees who had been cleared never knew when their case might be reopened. Even after the loyalty program was curbed in the late 1950s, the FBI continued to keep tabs on former loyalty defendants. Loyalty investigations often did lasting damage to employees' economic security, mental and physical health, personal relationships, and civic participation.

The Fear Spreads

The entertainment industry blacklist did not end with HUAC's investigation of Hollywood. As countersubversives issued a steady flow of accusations, the cloud of suspicion expanded. In 1950, the authors of the anticommunist newsletter Counterattack, who included several former FBI agents, released a booklet called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. It listed 151 writers, composers, producers, and performers and included a long list of allegedly subversive associations for each person. The booklet was riddled with factual errors. Some of those listed were or had been Communists, but others had not. In any case, they and those on similar lists found it nearly impossible to get work in their fields; some could get hired only by working under another name.

McCarthy's Fall and the Waning of the Second Red Scare

Many factors combined to weaken McCarthyism's power in the latter half of the 1950s. With a Republican in the White House as a result of the 1952 election, the partisan motivation for attacking the administration as soft on communism diminished. Opportunists such as Senator McCarthy made increasingly outrageous charges to remain in the spotlight, straining the patience of President Dwight Eisenhower and other Republican leaders such as Robert Taft of Ohio. In 1953 McCarthy became chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, and he used its Subcommittee on Investigations to hold hearings on alleged Communist influence in the State Department's Voice of America and overseas library programs. The book burnings that resulted from the latter investigation, and the forced resignation of the committee's research director, J. B. Matthews, after he claimed that the Protestant clergy at large had Communist sympathies, increased public criticism of McCarthy. Newspaper and television journalists began featuring the cases of government employees unfairly dismissed as loyalty or security risks, and various foundations and congressional committees undertook studies that gave further impetus to demands for reforming the loyalty program. McCarthy responded to his critics-from Edward Murrow of the See It Now television program to his fellow legislators-by accusing them of Communist sympathies. His conduct and that of his subordinate Roy Cohn in pressing unsubstantiated charges of disloyalty in the U.S. Army led to televised hearings beginning in April 1954, which gave viewers an extended opportunity to see McCarthy in action. McCarthy's popularity declined markedly as a result. In December the Senate censured McCarthy. A few months later, the FBI informant Harvey Matusow recanted, claiming that McCarthy and others had encouraged him to give false information and that he knew other ex-Communist witnesses, such as Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz, to have done the same.

Discussion of the Literature

Initial debates centered on assessing the causes of, or motivations behind, the anticommunist furor. Richard Hofstadter's influential interpretation explained McCarthy's popularity in psychological terms as a manifestation of the "status anxiety" of those who resented the changes associated with a more modern, pluralistic, secular society. Treating McCarthyism as an episode of mass irrationality, Hofstadter argued that its "real function" was "not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies . . . but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself." Subsequent scholarship demonstrated that Hofstadter's view neglected the role of elites, from congressional conservatives to liberal anticommunists to the FBI, in orchestrating the second Red Scare. Some accounts emphasized the partisan pressures from Republicans and southern Democrats on the Truman administration. Others placed a larger share of the responsibility on Cold War liberalism itself. Some of these scholars wrote from a critical stance influenced by the Vietnam-era disillusionment of the New Left, while others applauded liberal anticommunism and focused on how McCarthy had discredited it. After the post-Watergate strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act made FBI records accessible, attention shifted to the repressive tactics of J. Edgar Hoover, who put citizens under illegal surveillance, leaked information to congressional conservatives, and stood by informants known to be unreliable.

The tenor of debate shifted again when the end of the Cold War made available new evidence from Soviet archives and U.S. intelligence sources such as the VENONA decrypts. That evidence indicated that scholars had underestimated the success of Soviet espionage in the United States as well as the extent of Soviet control over the American Communist Party. Alger Hiss, contrary to what most liberals had believed, and contrary to what he maintained until his death in 1996, was almost certainly guilty of espionage. A few hundred other Americans were secret Communist Party members and shared information with Soviet agents, chiefly during World War II. Some historians interpreted the new evidence to put anticommunism in a more sympathetic light and to criticize scholarship on the positive achievements of American Communists. Others concluded that the reality of espionage did not lessen the damage done in the name of anticommunism. The stakes of the debate rose after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States produced the Patriot Act, which rekindled ideological disagreement over the proper balance between national security and civil liberties; commentators who feared that the "war on terrorism" would be used to quell domestic dissent cited McCarthyism as the relevant historical precedent. The new evidence did not resolve scholarly differences, but it produced a more complicated, frequently less romantic view of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). The paradoxical lesson from several decades of scholarship is that the same organization that inspired democratic idealists in the pursuit of social justice also was secretive, authoritarian, and morally compromised by ties to the Stalin regime.

Primary Sources

In a useful 1988 survey of archival sources on McCarthyism, Ellen Schrecker suggests looking for evidence created by various categories of players: inquisitors, targets, legitimizers, defenders of targets, and observers. It is with regard to the first two categories, especially, that new sources have become accessible. FBI files on individuals and organizations are revealing both about the targets and the inquisitors; some frequently requested files are available online, and others can be obtained, with patience, through a Freedom of Information Act Request. Washington, DC-area branches of the National Archives hold records of surviving case files from the federal employee loyalty program (Record Group 478.2), the Subversive Activities Control Board (Record Group 220.6), the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its predecessor (Record Group 233.25.1, 233.25.2), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (Record Group 46.15), and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Record Group 46.13). The rich papers of anticommunist investigator J. B. Matthews are at Duke University. The Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower Presidential Libraries hold relevant collections on each administration's handling of "the communist problem." The Library of Congress holds the papers of Supreme Court justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas and of Truman's attorney general James McGranery, while the papers of the many U.S. and state legislators who were prominent among the accusers and the accused can be found in various archives in their home states. Records of the American Legion can be found at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University holds the papers of the prime target of the second Red Scare-the Communist Party USA-as well as many related collections. The Fund for the Republic studied McCarthyism and subsequently became a target; its papers are at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University. Also at Princeton are the papers of Paul Tillett Jr., a political scientist who in the 1960s collected but never published a wide range of data on McCarthyism, and American Civil Liberties Union papers. Because so many groups and individuals participated in the second Red Scare in one role or another, manuscript and oral-history collections in archives all over the country hold relevant material. Good examples include the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, which holds the records of the Americans for Democratic Action, Highlander Folk School, and United Packinghouse Workers Union, among many other pertinent collections; the National Lawyers' Guild papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; the papers of the Civil Rights Congress at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; and labor movement records at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, and the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archives, University of Maryland.

Among the many published memoirs of participants, see Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by Slander (1950); Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952); Alger Hiss, In the Court of Public Opinion (1957); Peggy Dennis, Autobiography of an American Communist (1977); and John J. Abt, Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer (1993).

Links to Digital and Visual Materials

Notes:

(Joan Mahoney, "Civil Liberties in Britain during the Cold War: The Role of the Central Government," Markku Ruotsila, Michael J. Heale, "Beyond the 'Age of McCarthy': Anticommunism and the Historians," in Melvyn Stokes, ed., 1.) American Journal of Legal History 33, no. 1 (1989), 53-100; British and American Anti-communism before the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001); and The State of U.S. History (New York: Berg, 2002), 131-153.

(Harvey Klehr, Robin D. G. Kelley, Michael Denning, Kate Weigand, 2.) On Communist Party membership, seeSoviet and American Communist Parties, in Revelations from the Russian Archives, Library of Congress. For an introduction to the vast literature on the Communist Party, see The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997); and Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

(Ellen Schrecker, Michael Kazin, "The Agony and Romance of the American Left," John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, 4.) Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1994), 3; see also American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (1995), 1488-1512. Since the opening of Soviet archives at the end of the Cold War, an outpouring of scholarship has elaborated on both sides of the paradox-on one hand, the American party's complicity in espionage and with the Stalin regime, and on the other hand, its vital role in democratic social movements. For skepticism of this dualistic assessment of American communism, see In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 134-139.

( 6.) The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Minneapolis sedition law in 1920. Heale, "Citizens versus Outsiders," 46-47.

( 7.) Heale, "Citizens versus Outsiders," 53.

(Ellen Schrecker, 8.) Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 67.

( 9.) Heale, "Citizens versus Outsiders"; Theoharis, "The FBI and the Politics of Anti-communism."

(Eleanor Bontecou, 11.) The Federal Loyalty-Security Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953); and Rebecca Hill, "The History of the Smith Act and the Hatch Act: Anti-communism and the Rise of the Conservative Coalition in Congress," in Goldstein, ed., Little "Red Scares," 315-346.

( 12.) Dies was not alone; in 1944, Governor John Bricker of Ohio, who was the Republican nominee for vice president, claimed that Communists ran the whole New Deal. Storrs, Second Red Scare, 79-81, 251 (quotation), 287.

( 13.) Bontecou, Federal Loyalty-Security Program; Storrs, Second Red Scare.

( 14.) Storrs, Second Red Scare (program statistics, 292).

(Ralph S. Brown Jr., 17.) Loyalty and Security: Employment Tests in the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958).

(Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, Victor S. Navasky, Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Gerald Horne, 18.) The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980); Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980); Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin's, 1997); and The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

(Alice Kessler-Harris, 19.) Navasky, Naming Names; Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism, 54-61; and A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).

(Robert Justin Goldstein, 20.) American Blacklist: The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

( 21.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 186-189.

( 23.) Peters v. Hobby, 349 U.S. 331 (1955); Cole v. Young, 351 U.S. 536 (1956); Green v. McElroy 360 U.S. 474 (1959); and Vitarelli v. Seaton, 359 U.S. 535 (1959). In the early 1950s, by contrast, the U.S. Supreme Court had helped legitimize the Red Scare. Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951), for example, upheld the Smith Act; Bailey v. Richardson 341 U.S. 918 (1951) affirmed a lower court's ruling upholding the federal loyalty program.

(Michal R. Belknap, Arthur J. Sabin, Robert M. Lichtman, 24.) Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178 (1957); Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957). See The Supreme Court under Earl Warren, 1953-1969 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); In Calmer Times: The Supreme Court and Red Monday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression: One Hundred Decisions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

( 25.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 203-204.

(Mark Naison, Maurice Isserman, Robbie Lieberman, Randi Storch, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, 33.) Examples include Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); My Song is My Weapon: People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-35 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

(John Earl Haynes, Ann Coulter, M. Stanton Evans, 35.) Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); and Haynes and Klehr, In Denial. Haynes and Klehr acknowledged McCarthyism's abuses, but bestselling popular interpreters of the new findings did not; see, for example, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Three Rivers, 2004); and Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (New York: Three Rivers, 2009).

(Ellen Schrecker, "Soviet Espionage in America: An Oft-Told Tale," 36.) For a discussion of these debates, see Reviews in American History 38, no. 2 (2010), 355-361.

(John Sbardellati, Athan Theoharis, Michael J. Ybarra, Kathryn S. Olmsted, Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen, 37.) For example, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002); Goldstein, American Blacklist; Christopher John Gerard, "'A Program of Cooperation': The FBI, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the Communist Issue, 1950-1956" (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 1993); Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2004); Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

(Michael J. Heale, Don E. Carleton, Philip Jenkins, Don Parson, Colleen Doody, 38.) McCarthy's Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935-1965 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998). See also Red Scare! Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1985); The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Detroit's Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

(Elaine Tyler May, Robert D. Dean, Kyle A. Cuordileone, 40.) Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005); Johnson, Lavender Scare; and Storrs, Second Red Scare.

(Michael J. Heale, Robert Justin Goldstein, Alex Goodall, 41.) American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830-1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1978); Goldstein, ed., Little "Red Scares"; Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Storrs, Second Red Scare; and Doody, Detroit's Cold War.

(Jennifer Luff, Judy Kutulas, 42.) See Commonsense Anti-communism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Ruotsila, British and American Anti-communism; and The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

(Phillip Deery, Clarence Taylor, Alan M. Wald, Edward Alwood, David H. Price, Amy Swerdlow, "The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War," in Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., Shelton Stromquist, ed., Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang, eds., Aaron D. Purcell, Susan L. Brinson, 43.) A sampling of this early-21st-century work includes, in addition to works cited above, Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), on the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); U.S. History As Women's History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 296-312; Labor's Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: "Another Side of the Story" (New York: Palgrave, 2009); White Collar Radicals: TVA's Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009); and The Red Scare, Politics, and the Federal Communications Commission, 1941-1960 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).

(Ellen W. Schrecker, "Archival Sources for the Study of McCarthyism," 44.) Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988), 197-208.

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McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

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The second Red Scare refers to the fear of communism that permeated American politics, culture, and society from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the opening phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This episode of political repression lasted longer and was more pervasive than the Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I.

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McCarthy "claiming that large numbers of Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department"

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"He despised the vicious and narrow-minded totalitarian spirit communism represented, but he and other liberals thought they saw the same spirit among their fellow Americans on the political right."

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Joseph McCarthyReexaming the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Book, but not primary resources)

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Joseph McCarthyReexaming the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Book, but not primary resources)

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https://nyti.ms/2rCdfvD

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"like Hitler, McCarthy was a screamer, a political thug, a master of the mob," and that he "usurped executive and judicial authority whenever the fancy struck him."

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McCarthyism and the Red Scare | C-SPAN Classroom

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Beginning in 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy started to make claims of a widespread infiltration of communists and communist sympathizers in the U.S. Government. Senator McCarthy continued to investigate and spread fear about communism in the U.S. until he was ultimately discredited and censured by the U.S. Senate in December of 1954.

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1. What are the impacts of McCarthyism?

2. Did it contribute to the american culture? American society? economics?

3. Should there have been McCarthy or not?

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Table of Contents

1. The Cold War

2. Joseph McCarthy and the Rise of McCarthyism

3. 'Have you no sense of decency, sir?'

4. The Fall of Joseph McCarthy

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the prospect of communist subversion at home and abroad seemed frighteningly real to many people in the United States. These fears came to define-and, in some cases, corrode-the era's political culture. For many Americans, the most enduring symbol of this "Red Scare" was Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Senator McCarthy spent almost five years trying in vain to expose communists and other left-wing "loyalty risks" in the U.S. government. In the hyper-suspicious atmosphere of the Cold War, insinuations of disloyalty were enough to convince many Americans that their government was packed with traitors and spies. McCarthy's accusations were so intimidating that few people dared to speak out against him. It was not until he attacked the Army in 1954 that his actions earned him the censure of the U.S. Senate.

The Cold War

In the years after World War II ended, events at home and abroad seemed to many Americans to prove that the "Red menace" was real. In August 1949, for instance, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. Later that year, Communist forces declared victory in the Chinese Civil War and established the People's Republic of China. In 1950, North Korea's Soviet-backed army invaded its pro-Western neighbors to the South; in response, the United States entered the conflict on the side of South Korea.

Did you know? Along with the Army-McCarthy hearings, journalist Edward R. Murrow's exposés of McCarthyism played an important role in the senator's downfall. On March 9, 1954, millions of Americans watched as the national news program "See It Now" attacked McCarthy and his methods.

At the same time, the Republican-led House Un-American Activities Committee (known as HUAC) began a determined campaign to extirpate communist subversion at home. HUAC's targets included left-wingers in Hollywood and liberals in the State Department. In 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required that all "subversives" in the United States submit to government supervision. (President Truman vetoed the Act-he said it "would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights"-but a Congressional majority overrode his veto.)

Joseph McCarthy and the Rise of McCarthyism

All of these factors combined to create an atmosphere of fear and dread, which proved a ripe environment for the rise of a staunch anticommunist like Joseph McCarthy. At the time, McCarthy was a first-term senator from Wisconsin who had won election in 1946 after a campaign in which he criticized his opponent's failure to enlist during World War II while emphasizing his own wartime heroics.

In February 1950, appearing at the Ohio County Women's Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy gave a speech that propelled him into the national spotlight. Waving a piece of paper in the air, he declared that he had a list of 205 known members of the Communist Party who were "working and shaping policy" in the State Department.

The next month, a Senate subcommittee launched an investigation and found no proof of any subversive activity. Moreover, many of McCarthy's Democratic and Republican colleagues, including President Dwight Eisenhower, disapproved of his tactics ("I will not get into the gutter with this guy," the president told his aides). Still, the senator continued his so-called Red-baiting campaign. In 1953, at the beginning of his second term as senator, McCarthy was put in charge of the Committee on Government Operations, which allowed him to launch even more expansive investigations of the alleged communist infiltration of the federal government. In hearing after hearing, he aggressively interrogated witnesses in what many came to perceive as a blatant violation of their civil rights. Despite a lack of any proof of subversion, more than 2,000 government employees lost their jobs as a result of McCarthy's investigations.

'Have you no sense of decency, sir?'

In April 1954, Senator McCarthy turned his attention to "exposing" the supposed communist infiltration of the armed services. Many people had been willing to overlook their discomfort with McCarthyism during the senator's campaign against government employees and others they saw as "elites"; now, however, their support began to wane. Almost at once, the aura of invulnerability that had surrounded McCarthy for nearly five years began to disappear. First, the Army undermined the senator's credibility by showing evidence that he had tried to win preferential treatment for his aides when they were drafted. Then came the fatal blow: the decision to broadcast the "Army-McCarthy" hearings on national television. The American people watched as McCarthy intimidated witnesses and offered evasive responses when questioned. When he attacked a young Army lawyer, the Army's chief counsel thundered, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" The Army-McCarthy hearings struck many observers as a shameful moment in American politics.

The Fall of Joseph McCarthy

By the time the hearings were over, McCarthy had lost most of his allies. The Senate voted to condemn him for his "inexcusable," "reprehensible," "vulgar and insulting" conduct "unbecoming a senator." He kept his job but lost his power, and died in 1957 at the age of 48.

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The Cold War Joseph McCarthy and the Rise of McCarthyism 'Have you no sense of decency, sir?' The Fall of Joseph McCarthy During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the prospect of communist subversion at home and abroad seemed frighteningly real to many people in the United States.

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Table of Contents

1. First Red Scare: 1917-1920

2. Cold War Concerns About Communism

3. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

4. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

5. Hysteria and Growing Conservatism

6. Red Scare Impact

The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Communists were often referred to as "Reds" for their allegiance to the red Soviet flag.) The Red Scare led to a range of actions that had a profound and enduring effect on U.S. government and society. Federal employees were analyzed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, investigated allegations of subversive elements in the government and the Hollywood film industry. The climate of fear and repression linked to the Red Scare finally began to ease by the late 1950s.

First Red Scare: 1917-1920

In the United States, labor strikes were on the rise, and the press sensationalized them as being caused by immigrants bent on bringing down the American way of life. The Sedition Act of 1918 targeted people who criticized the government, monitoring radicals and labor union leaders with the threat of deportation.

The fear turned to violence with the 1919 anarchist bombings, a series of bombs targeting law enforcement and government officials. Bombs went off in a wide number of cities including Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, D.C., and New York City.

The first Red Scare climaxed in 1919 and 1920, when United States Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer ordered the Palmer raids, a series of violent law-enforcement raids targeting leftist radicals and anarchists. They kicked off a period of unrest that became known as the "Red Summer."

Cold War Concerns About Communism

Did you know? FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was quick to equate any kind of protest with communist subversion, including the civil rights demonstrations led by Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover labeled King a communist and covertly worked to intimidate and discredit the civil rights leader.

Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

The information obtained by the FBI proved essential in high-profile legal cases, including the 1949 conviction of 12 prominent leaders of the American Communist Party on charges that they had advocated the overthrow of the government. Moreover, Hoover's agents helped build the case against Julius Rosenberg (1918-53) and his wife, Ethel Rosenberg (1915-53), who were convicted of espionage in 1951. The Rosenbergs were executed two years later.

Hysteria and Growing Conservatism

Public concerns about communism were heightened by international events. In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear bomb and communist forces led by Mao Zedong (1893-1976) took control of China. The following year saw the start of the Korean War (1950-53), which engaged U.S. troops in combat against the communist-supported forces of North Korea. The advances of communism around the world convinced many U.S. citizens that there was a real danger of "Reds" taking over their own country. Figures such as McCarthy and Hoover fanned the flames of fear by wildly exaggerating that possibility.

As the Red Scare intensified, its political climate turned increasingly conservative. Elected officials from both major parties sought to portray themselves as staunch anticommunists, and few people dared to criticize the questionable tactics used to persecute suspected radicals. Membership in leftist groups dropped as it became clear that such associations could lead to serious consequences, and dissenting voices from the left side of the political spectrum fell silent on a range of important issues. In judicial affairs, for example, support for free speech and other civil liberties eroded significantly. This trend was symbolized by the 1951 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dennis v. United States, which said that the free-speech rights of accused Communists could be restricted because their actions presented a clear and present danger to the government.

Red Scare Impact

Americans also felt the effects of the Red Scare on a personal level, and thousands of alleged communist sympathizers saw their lives disrupted. They were hounded by law enforcement, alienated from friends and family and fired from their jobs. While a small number of the accused may have been aspiring revolutionaries, most others were the victims of false allegations or had done nothing more than exercise their democratic right to join a political party.

Though the climate of fear and repression began to ease in the late 1950s, the Red Scare has continued to influence political debate in the decades since. It is often cited as an example of how unfounded fears can compromise civil liberties.

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Red Scare: Cold War, McCarthyism & Facts | HISTORY

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The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War era.

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