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What is McCarthyism?

What led to mccarthyism, how did mccarthyism begin, when and how did mccarthyism end, what were the results of mccarthyism.

McCarthyism

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McCarthyism is part of the Red Scare period of American history in the late 1940s and 1950s. During that time, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy produced a series of investigations and hearings to expose supposed communist infiltration of various areas of the U.S. government. Other aspects of the Red Scare included the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood blacklist . The term McCarthyism has since become a byname for defamation of character or reputation by indiscriminate allegations on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.

The idea that it was necessary to guard against people seeking to overthrow the U.S. government took root early in the 20th century. Advances made by the Soviet Union following World War II , coupled with the victory in 1949 of the Chinese Communist Party in establishing the People’s Republic of China and the apparent inability of the United States to prevent the spread of communism , were among the factors causing fear of communist infiltration in the United States.

In 1950, Joseph McCarthy, who had been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, made a speech in Wheeling , West Virginia , in which he stated that the U.S. was engaged in a “battle between communistic atheism and Christianity” and declared that he had “here in my hand” a list of a large number of communists working in the State Department—a number that he gave at various times as 205, 81, and 57. The accusations triggered investigations and kept McCarthy and his search for communist subversion within the U.S. government in the spotlight.

Joseph McCarthy’s accusations of communist infiltration into the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the army ’s charge that McCarthy had sought preferential treatment for a recently drafted associate led to 36 days of televised Senate hearings, known as the McCarthy hearings, that began in April 1954. The event showcased McCarthy’s bullying tactics and culminated when, after McCarthy charged that the army’s lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, employed a man who had once belonged to a communist front group, Welch responded, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Also in 1954, journalist Edward R. Morrow produced an exposé of McCarthy on his news program See It Now . The public turned against McCarthy, and the Senate censured him.

Joseph McCarthy’s charges that various government entities were infested with communists or communist sympathizers were mostly undocumented, and he was unable to make plausible charges against any person or institution. Nonetheless, his accusations resulted in some people losing their jobs and others facing popular condemnation. The persecution of innocent persons on the charge of being communist and the forced conformity that the practice engendered in public life came to be called McCarthyism.

McCarthyism , name given to the period of time in American history that saw U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin produce a series of investigations and hearings during the 1950s in an effort to expose supposed communist infiltration of various areas of the U.S. government. The term has since become a byname for defamation of character or reputation by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations, especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.

McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1946 and rose to prominence in 1950 when he claimed in a speech in Wheeling , West Virginia , that 57 communists had infiltrated the State Department , adding:

One thing to remember in discussing the Communists in our government is that we are not dealing with spies who get thirty pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.

McCarthy’s subsequent search for communists in the Central Intelligence Agency , the State Department, and elsewhere made him an incredibly polarizing figure. After McCarthy’s reelection in 1952, he obtained the chairmanship of the Committee on Government Operations of the Senate and of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. For the next two years he was constantly in the spotlight, investigating various government departments and questioning innumerable witnesses about their suspected communist affiliations. Although he failed to make a plausible case against anyone, his colourful and cleverly presented accusations drove some persons out of their jobs and brought popular condemnation to others.

McCarthyism both reached its peak and began its decline during the “McCarthy hearings”: 36 days of televised investigative hearings led by McCarthy in 1954. After first calling hearings to investigate possible espionage at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey , the junior senator turned his communist-chasing committee’s attention to an altogether different matter, the question of whether the Army had promoted a dentist who had refused to answer questions for the Loyalty Security Screening Board. The hearings reached their climax when McCarthy suggested that the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch , had employed a man who at one time had belonged to a communist front group. Welch’s rebuke to the senator—“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”—discredited McCarthy and helped to turn the tide of public opinion against him. Moreover, McCarthy was also eventually undermined significantly by the incisive and skillful criticism of a journalist, Edward R. Murrow . Murrow’s devastating television editorial about McCarthy, carried out on his show, See It Now , cemented him as the premier journalist of the time. McCarthy was censured for his conduct by the Senate, and in 1957 he died. While McCarthyism proper ended with the senator’s downfall, the term still has currency in modern political discourse.

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McCarthyism and the Red Scare

In the end, President Eisenhower had no choice but to fight back against Senator Joseph McCarthy—and he did

In the early 1950s, American leaders repeatedly told the public that they should be fearful of subversive Communist influence in their lives. Communists could be lurking anywhere, using their positions as school teachers, college professors, labor organizers, artists, or journalists to aid the program of world Communist domination. This paranoia about the internal Communist threat—what we call the Red Scare—reached a fever pitch between 1950 and 1954, when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, a right-wing Republican, launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army. During Eisenhower’s first two years in office, McCarthy’s shrieking denunciations and fear-mongering created a climate of fear and suspicion across the country. No one dared tangle with McCarthy for fear of being labeled disloyal.

Any man who has been named by a either a senator or a committee or a congressman as dangerous to the welfare of this nation, his name should be submitted to the various intelligence units, and they should conduct a complete check upon him. It’s not too much to ask. Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1953

It has long been a subject of debate among historians: Why didn’t Eisenhower do more to confront McCarthy? Journalists, intellectuals, and even many of Eisenhower’s friends and close advisers agonized over what they saw as Ike’s timid approach to McCarthyism. Despite his popularity and his enormous political capital, they believed, Ike refused to engage directly with McCarthy. By avoiding the Red-hunting senator, some have argued, Eisenhower allowed McCarthyism to continue unchecked.

By contrast, later scholars working from the documentary record perceived a design in Eisenhower’s strategy with McCarthy. Ike adopted an “indirect approach.” Instead of going right at McCarthy, Eisenhower worked behind the scenes to undercut and stymie the senator and his attacks. The political scientist Fred Greenstein, for example, argued that Eisenhower’s handling of McCarthy provides evidence of a “hidden hand” approach to government. In this interpretation, Ike rode above the fray of politics while secretly pulling levers and using White House influence to obstruct McCarthy and his allies.

President read my text with great irritation, slammed it back at me and said he would not refer to McCarthy personally—‘I will not get in the gutter with that guy.’ C. D. Jackson, Eisenhower speechwriter, 1953

Looking at all the evidence, the clearest conclusion is that Eisenhower did not want to confront Joe McCarthy at all. And during 1953, he tried to avoid the whole issue, hoping the Senate would silence the explosive senator. McCarthy was a Republican, after all, and many fellow senators supported him. Ike needed to keep his party unified to pass bills in other areas; battling McCarthy would only stir up a civil war inside the GOP.

Furthermore, Eisenhower did not want to appear “soft” on the problem of internal subversion. There had, after all, been real spies who penetrated into the State Department, notably Alger Hiss.

And Communist agents had stolen classified secrets from the wartime Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were condemned to die in the electric chair as punishment for their theft of atomic secrets, Eisenhower did not for a moment consider granting them clemency. On June 19, 1953, they were both put to death.

Eisenhower in 1953 improvised in dealing with McCarthy, at first trying to ignore him, then trying to outdo him in the Red-hunting business. Then he tried to seduce him with promises of new legislation to destroy Communism in America. None of these tactics worked. ‘The Age of Eisenhower ,’ chapter 6

But at the start of 1954, the picture changed. Joe McCarthy turned his investigatory resources on the US Army and on members of the administration itself. Eisenhower had no choice but to fight back. The first move the White House made was to try to discredit the men around McCarthy, notably the lawyer Roy Cohn, who was leading the investigation, and Cohn’s assistant David Schine, who had recently been drafted into the Army.

The Army compiled a damaging dossier of dirt on Cohn, showing that he used threats and intimidation to demand that Schine be given plum assignments and easy duty. The White House leaked this dossier to the press and Congress. McCarthy and Cohn now stood accused of abuse of power.

Ike went one step further. In order to close down McCarthy’s reckless use of subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify before his committee, Eisenhower invoked executive privilege.

In May 1954, Ike simply said that administration officials and all executive branch employees would ignore any call from McCarthy to testify. Eisenhower explained his action, declaring that “it is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the executive branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising with each other on official matters,” without those conversations being subject to Congressional scrutiny.

It was a bold and daring move, and it worked. McCarthy, his credibility in tatters and now starved of witnesses, hit a brick wall—and his fellow senators turned against him. In early December 1954, the Senate passed a motion of condemnation, in a vote of 67 to 22. McCarthy was ruined—and within three years he was dead from alcohol abuse. The era of McCarthyism was over. Ike had helped bring it to a bitter end.

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Spies on the radio.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, dramatic radio programs told tales of government agents on a quest to find Communist infiltrators who, in the words of one, "would undermine our America."

David Harding, Counterspy  began in 1942 as the story of an American operative fighting the Nazis, and the long-running program easily adapted to a Cold War narrative in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In this episode from December 1950, Harding reads a message from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover calling on law enforcement officers, patriotic organizations, and individuals to report on anything that might indicate espionage, sabotage, or subversive activities.

I Was a Communist for the FBI , based on a film of the same name, ran for just over a year, from April 1952 until October 1953. In this episode, from April 1953, Matt Cvetic describes his undercover assignment: "For nine years I was living on the brink of a volcano, a volcano called Communism, a volcano which is centered in Soviet Russia but which is erupting all over the world."  

Comics and pulps

Comic books and pulp fiction magazines also brought the threat of Communism to life. The Catholic Catechetical Guild of Minneapolis published these two comics for distribution in 1947 and 1960.

McCarthy begins to question Ike

In this November 24, 1953, address over radio and television, McCarthy turned an attack on former President Truman to questions directed at Eisenhower. “Even for McCarthy," says Will Hitchcock in The Age of Eisenhower , this was a loopy, unhinged performance.”

Death of a senator

The new york times reports on mccarthy's death.

McCarthy died of liver failure on May 2, 1957. The following day the New York Times front page story said, “After the Senate voted in December 1954 to condemn his tactics, his political power waned. He was seldom in his Senate seat and his advice, seldom offered, was little heeded.”

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What is mccarthyism and how did it happen - ellen schrecker.

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In the 1950s, as part of a campaign to expose suspected Communists, thousands of individuals were aggressively investigated and questioned before government panels. Named after its most notorious practitioner, the phenomenon known as McCarthyism destroyed lives and careers. But how did this episode of political repression take off? Ellen Schrecker traces the history of McCarthyism.

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 21, 2023 | Original: June 1, 2010

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

The first Red Scare occurred in the wake of World War I . The Russian Revolution of 1917 saw the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin , topple the Romanov dynasty, kicking off the rise of the communist party and inspiring international fear of Bolsheviks and anarchists.

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

Following World War II (1939-45), the democratic United States and the communist Soviet Union became engaged in a series of largely political and economic clashes known as the Cold War . The intense rivalry between the two superpowers raised concerns in the United States that Communists and leftist sympathizers inside America might actively work as Soviet spies and pose a threat to U.S. security.

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.

Such ideas were not totally unfounded. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had long carried out espionage activities inside America with the aid of U.S. citizens, particularly during World War II. As apprehension about Soviet influence grew as the Cold War heated up, U.S. leaders decided to take action. On March 21, 1947, President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) issued Executive Order 9835, also known as the Loyalty Order , which mandated that all federal employees be analyzed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government. Truman’s loyalty program was a startling development for a country that prized the concepts of personal liberty and freedom of political organization. Yet it was only one of many questionable activities that occurred during the period of anticommunist hysteria known as the Red Scare.

Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

One of the pioneering efforts to investigate communist activities took place in the U.S. House of Representatives , where the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC ) was formed in 1938. HUAC’s investigations frequently focused on exposing Communists working inside the federal government or subversive elements working in the Hollywood film industry, and the committee gained new momentum following World War II, as the Cold War began. Under pressure from the negative publicity aimed at their studios, movie executives created Hollywood blacklists that barred suspected radicals from employment; similar lists were also established in other industries.

Another congressional investigator, U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-57) of Wisconsin , became the person most closely associated with the anticommunist crusade–and with its excesses. McCarthy used hearsay and intimidation to establish himself as a powerful and feared figure in American politics. He leveled charges of disloyalty at celebrities, intellectuals and anyone who disagreed with his political views, costing many of his victims their reputations and jobs. McCarthy’s reign of terror continued until his colleagues formally denounced his tactics in 1954 during the Army-McCarthy hearings , when army lawyer Joseph Welch famously asked McCarthy, “Have you no decency?”

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI , and its longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), aided many of the legislative investigations of communist activities. An ardent anticommunist, Hoover had been a key player in an earlier, though less pervasive, Red Scare in the years following World War I (1914-18). With the dawning of the new anticommunist crusade in the late 1940s, Hoover’s agency compiled extensive files on suspected subversives through the use of wiretaps, surveillance and the infiltration of leftist groups.

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.

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How Communists Became a Scapegoat for the Red Summer ‘Race Riots’ of 1919

A conspiracy theory emerged during the Red Scare, blaming “the Bolsheviki” for protests and violence.

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.

HISTORY Vault: The Korean War: Fire & Ice

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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Article contents

Mccarthyism and the second red scare.

• Landon R. Y. Storrs Landon R. Y. Storrs Department of History, University of Iowa
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.6
• Published online: 02 July 2015

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.

• anticommunism
• Martin Dies
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• federal loyalty program
• J. Edgar Hoover
• House Un-American Activities Committee
• Joseph McCarthy
• political repression

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.

Anticommunism has taken especially virulent forms in the United States because of distinctive features of its political tradition. As citizens of a relatively young and diverse republic, Americans historically have been fearful of “enemies within” and have drawn on their oft-noted predilection for voluntary associations to patrol for subversives. This popular predisposition in turn has been easier for powerful interests to exploit in the American context because of the absence of a parliamentary system (which elsewhere produced a larger number of political parties as well as stronger party discipline) and of a strong civil service bureaucracy. Great Britain, a U.S. ally in the Cold War, did not experience a comparable Red Scare even though it too struggled against espionage. 1

The American Communist Party

Explaining American anticommunism requires an assessment of American communism. The 19th-century writings of Karl Marx gave birth to an international socialist movement that denounced capitalism for exploiting the working class. Some socialists pursued reform through existing political systems while others advocated revolution. Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 encouraged those in the latter camp. The American Communist Party (CPUSA), established in 1919 , belonged to the Moscow-based Comintern, which provided funding and issued directives, ostensibly to encourage Communist revolutions around the world but in practice to support Soviet foreign-policy objectives. The CPUSA remained small and factionalized until the international economic crisis and the rise of European fascism in the 1930s increased its appeal. During the Great Depression, “the heyday of American communism,” party members won admiration from the broader Left for their effective organizing on behalf of industrial and agricultural workers and for their bold denunciation of lynching, poll taxes, and other instruments of white supremacy. In 1935 , party leaders adopted a strategy of cooperating with noncommunists in a “Popular Front against fascism.” Party members joined or organized groups that criticized Adolf Hitler’s policies and supported the Spanish resistance to General Francisco Franco. They also drew connections between fascism abroad and events at home, from the violent suppression of striking miners, textile workers, and farmworkers, to the unfair trial of the “Scottsboro boys” (nine African American teenagers from Alabama accused of raping two white women), to prohibitions on married women’s employment. Not always aware of the participation of Communists, diverse activists worked through hundreds of Popular Front organizations on behalf of labor, racial and religious minorities, and civil liberties. The CPUSA itself grew to about 75,000 members in 1938 ; many times that number participated in Popular Front causes. 2 Because rank-and-file members often kept their party affiliation secret as they attempted to influence Popular Front groups, the term “front organization” came to connote duplicity rather than solidarity.

The Popular Front period ended abruptly in August 1939 , when the Soviet and German leaders signed a nonaggression pact. Overnight the CPUSA abandoned its fight against fascism to argue for “peace” and against U.S. intervention in Europe. Exposing the American party leadership’s subservience to Moscow, this shift alienated many party members as well as the noncommunist leftists and liberals who had been willing to cooperate toward shared objectives. In June 1941 , Hitler broke the pact by invading the Soviet Union, and the Soviets became American allies. Reversing course again, American Communists enthusiastically supported the Allied war effort, and the party’s general secretary, Earl Browder, adopted a reformist rather than revolutionary program. With Hitler’s defeat, however, the fragile Soviet-American alliance dissolved; U.S. use of atomic weapons in Japan and Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe inaugurated the long Cold War between the two powers. In 1945 William Z. Foster replaced Browder at the head of the American party, which now harshly denounced capitalism and President Harry Truman’s foreign policy. Riven by internal disputes and increasingly under attack from anticommunists, the CPUSA became more isolated. Its numbers had dwindled to below 10,000 by 1956 , when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev officially acknowledged what many American Communists had refused to believe: that Stalin had been responsible for the death of millions in forced labor camps and in executions of political rivals. After these revelations, the CPUSA faded into insignificance. 3

As the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, American Communists were neither devils nor saints. The party’s secretiveness, its authoritarian internal structure, and the loyalty of its leaders to the Kremlin were fundamental flaws that help explain why and how it was demonized. On the other hand, most American Communists were idealists attracted by the party’s militance against various forms of social injustice. The party was a dynamic part of the broader Left that in the 1930s and 1940s advanced the causes of labor, minority rights, and feminism. 4

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 correlation between labor unrest and anticommunist zeal was enduring. The first major Red Scare emerged during the postwar strike wave of 1919 and produced the initial infrastructure for waging war on domestic communism. Diverse strikes across the nation coincided with a series of mail bombings by anarchists. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer charged that these events were evidence of a revolutionary conspiracy. Palmer directed the young J. Edgar Hoover, head of the General Intelligence Division of the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI), to arrest radicals and their associates and to deport the foreign born among them. The ensuing raids and surveillance activities violated civil liberties, and in 1924 the bureau was reined in. But Hoover became FBI director, a position he would hold until his death in 1972 . Intensely anticommunist, and prone to associating any challenge to the economic or social status quo with communism, Hoover would be a key player in the second Red Scare. Other early participants in the anticommunist network were Red squads on metropolitan police forces, patriotic societies and veterans’ groups, and employer associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 5

After the wartime federal sedition and espionage laws expired, and after the FBI was curbed, state and local officials took primary responsibility for fighting communism. By 1921 thirty-five states had passed sedition or criminal syndicalism laws (the latter directed chiefly at labor organizations and vaguely defined to prohibit sabotage or other crimes committed in the name of political reform). 6 Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, anticommunists mobilized in local battles with labor militants; for example, in steel, textiles, and agriculture and among longshoremen. The limitations of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in organizing mass-production industries led to the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which organized workers regardless of craft into industry-wide unions such as the United Automobile Workers. Encouraged by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 , the CIO pioneered aggressive tactics such as the sit-down strike and further distinguished itself from the AFL with its organizing efforts among women and racial minorities. These positions attracted Communists to the CIO’s service, leading anti-union forces to charge that the CIO was a tool of Communist revolutionaries (a charge that the AFL echoed). Charges of communism were especially common in response to labor protests by African Americans in the South and by Mexican Americans in the West. 7

Education was another anticommunist concern during the interwar period. Groups such as the American Legion pressured school boards to drop “un-American” books from the curriculum. By 1936 , twenty-one states required loyalty oaths for teachers. School boards and state legislatures investigated allegations of subversion among teachers and college professors. 8 Also in these interwar years, organized Catholics joined the campaign against “godless” communism. Throughout this period, the federal role in fighting communism consisted mainly of using immigration law to keep foreign-born radicals out of the country, but the FBI continued to monitor the activities of Communists and their alleged sympathizers. 9

The political and legal foundations of the second Red Scare thus were under construction well before the Cold War began. In Congress, a conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats had crystallized by 1938 . Congressional conservatives disliked many New Deal policies—from public works to consumer protection to, above all, labor rights—and they frequently charged that the administering agencies were influenced by Communists. In 1938 the House authorized a Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, headed by Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat. Dies was known as a leading opponent of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 , the CIO, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 . The Dies Committee devoted most of its attention to alleged Communists in the labor and consumer movements and in New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA). For his chief investigator, Dies hired J. B. Matthews, a self-proclaimed former fellow traveler of the Communist Party who later would serve on Senator McCarthy’s staff. Matthews forged a career path for ex-leftists whose perceived expertise was valuable to congressional committees, the FBI, and anti–New Deal media magnates such as William Randolph Hearst. In one early salvo against the Roosevelt administration, Dies Committee members called for the impeachment of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins because she refused to deport the Communist labor leader Harry Bridges; Perkins claimed (correctly) that she did not have the legal authority to deport him. 10 The Bridges controversy and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of August 1939 gave impetus to the passage of Alien Registration Act of 1940 , known as the Smith Act for its sponsor Representative Howard Smith, the Virginia Democrat whose own House committee was investigating alleged Communist influence on the National Labor Relations Board. The Smith Act made it illegal to advocate overthrow of the government, effectively criminalizing membership in the Communist Party, and allowed deportation of aliens who ever had belonged to a seditious organization. Congressional conservatives also engineered passage of the 1939 Hatch Act, which prohibited federal employees from engaging in political campaigning and from belonging to any group that advocated “the overthrow of the existing constitutional form of government.” 11 The law’s passage was driven by the first provision, which responded to allegations that Democratic politicians were using WPA jobs for campaign purposes. It was the Hatch Act’s other provision, however, that created a vital mechanism of the second Red Scare.

The Federal Loyalty Program

To enforce the Hatch Act, the U.S. attorney general’s office generated a list of subversive organizations, and employing agencies requested background checks from the FBI, which checked its own files as well as those of the Dies Committee. FBI agents interviewed government employees who admitted having or were alleged to have associations with any listed group. Congressional conservatives continued accusing the Roosevelt administration of harboring Communists, even after Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 put the Soviets in the Allied camp. Martin Dies charged that the wartime Office of Price Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and other regulatory agencies were run by Communists and “crackpot, radical bureaucrats.” The Civil Service Commission (CSC) created a loyalty board, which reviewed employees named by Dies. When most of those employees were retained, the Dies Committee charged that CSC examiners themselves had subversive tendencies. In 1943 the Dies Committee subpoenaed hundreds of CSC case files in an effort to prove that charge. 12

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.

The second Red Scare derived its momentum from fears that Communist spies in powerful government positions were manipulating U.S. policy to Soviet advantage. The federal employee loyalty program that Truman authorized in an attempt to neutralize right-wing accusations became instead a key force in sustaining and spreading “the great fear.” Truman’s March 1947 Executive Order 9835 directed executive departments to create loyalty boards to evaluate derogatory information about employees or job applicants. Employees for whom “reasonable grounds for belief in disloyalty” could be established were to be dismissed. To assist in implementing the loyalty program, the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) was made public for the first time. Millions of federal employees filled out loyalty forms swearing they did not belong to any subversive organization and explaining any association they might have with a designated group. Agency loyalty boards requested name checks and sometimes full field investigations by the FBI, which promptly hired 7,000 additional agents. Among the many sources that the FBI checked were the ever-expanding files of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which in 1945 had replaced the Dies Committee. 13

During the program’s peak between 1947 and 1956 , more than five million federal workers underwent loyalty screening, resulting in an estimated 2,700 dismissals and 12,000 resignations. Those numbers exclude job applicants who were rejected on loyalty grounds. More importantly, those numbers exclude the tens of thousands of civil servants who eventually were cleared after one or more rounds of investigation, which could include replying to written interrogatories, hearings, appeals, and months of waiting, sometimes without pay, for a decision. The program’s oft-noted flaws included the ambiguous definition of “derogatory” information and the anonymity of informants who provided it, the reliance on an arbitrary and changing list of subversive organizations, and a double-jeopardy problem for employees for whom a move from one government job to another triggered reinvestigation on the same grounds. Those grounds usually consisted of a list of individually minor associations that dated back to the 1930s. Because loyalty standards became more restrictive over time, employees who did not change jobs too faced reinvestigation, even in the absence of new allegations against them. 14

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. 15

Because most of those dismissed under the loyalty program were low-level employees, the program’s policy impact, at least outside the State Department’s jurisdiction, has sometimes been underestimated. Unlike dismissals, investigations occurred across the ranks, so all civil servants felt the pressure. Case files declassified in the early 21st century indicate that loyalty investigations truncated or redirected the careers of many high-ranking civil servants, who typically kept secret the fact that they had been investigated. Many of them were noncommunist but left-leaning New Dealers who advocated measures designed to expand democracy by regulating the economy and reducing social inequalities. Their fields of expertise included labor and civil rights, consumer protection, welfare, national health insurance, public power, and public housing; their marginalization by charges of disloyalty impeded reform in these areas and narrowed the scope of political discourse more generally. Through the federal loyalty program, conservative anticommunists exploited public fears of espionage to block policy initiatives that impinged on private-sector prerogatives. 16

The Fear Spreads

The loyalty program for federal employees was accompanied by similar programs focused on port security and industrial security. Private employees on government contracts also faced screening, and state and local governments soon imitated the federal programs. Public universities revived mandatory loyalty oaths. In 1953 , Americans employed by international organizations such as the United Nations became subject to Civil Service Commission loyalty screening, over protests that such screening violated the sovereignty of the international organizations. One researcher estimated in 1958 that approximately 20 percent of the U.S. labor force faced some form of loyalty test. 17 Although espionage trials and congressional hearings were the most-sensational manifestations of McCarthyism, loyalty tests for employment directly affected many more people.

Beyond the realms of government, industry, and transport, anticommunists trained their sights on those arenas where they deemed the potential for ideological subversion to be high, including education and the media. The entertainment industry was an especially attractive target for congressional investigating committees seeking to generate sensational headlines. The House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) 1947 investigation of Communist influence in Hollywood was an early example. Building on an earlier investigation by California’s Tenney Committee, HUAC subpoenaed a long list of players in the film industry. Many of them, including the actor Ronald Reagan, cooperated with HUAC by naming people they believed to be Communists. By contrast, a group that became known as the “Hollywood Ten” invoked their First Amendment right to freedom of association and challenged the committee’s right to ask about their political views. Eventually, after the Supreme Court refused to hear their case, the ten directors and screenwriters spent six months in prison. For more than a decade beyond that, they were blacklisted by Hollywood employers. 18 Later, “unfriendly witnesses” declined to answer questions posed by the investigating committee, by citing their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves. This tactic provided legal protection from prison, but “taking the Fifth” was widely interpreted as tantamount to an admission of guilt, and many employers refused to employ anyone who had so pleaded. Another limitation of the Fifth Amendment strategy was that it did not waive witnesses’ obligation to answer questions about others. Congressional committees pressed witnesses to “name names” of people they knew to be Communists as evidence that they were not sympathetic, or were no longer sympathetic, to communism. Whether or not they answered questions about their own politics, witnesses’ moral dilemma over whether to identify others as Communists became one of the most familiar, and to critics most infamous, of McCarthyism’s dramatic episodes. 19

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.

The fear of unemployment produced many ripple effects beyond those felt at the individual level. The second Red Scare curtailed Americans’ willingness to join voluntary organizations. Groups were added to the U.S. attorney general’s list over time, and zealous anticommunists frequently charged that one group or another should be added to the list, including such mainstream, reformist organizations as the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Association of University Women. Very few of the roughly 280 organizations on the official list engaged in illegal activity. 20 Still, association with any listed group could become a bar to employment, and also potentially a justification for exclusion from public housing and veterans’ benefits. Rather than take chances, many people stopped belonging to organizations. Being known as a “joiner” of causes acquired the connotation of being an easy mark for Communists, and defense attorneys encouraged their clients to present themselves as allergic to such activity. 21 Civic groups lost membership, and many Americans hesitated to sign petitions or engage in any activism that might possibly be construed as controversial.

The second Red Scare also reshaped the American labor movement. By the end of World War II, a dozen Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions had Communist party members among their officers. Top CIO leaders tolerated Communists at first, valuing their dedication and hoping to avoid internal division and external attack. In 1947 , however, congressional conservatives overrode President Harry Truman’s veto and passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, required all union officers to swear that they were not Communists or else to face loss of support from the National Labor Relations Board. Many trade union members, especially Catholics, were intensely anticommunist and stepped up their effort to oust Communists from their leadership. In 1948 the Communist Party made the position of its members in the labor movement more difficult by supporting the Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace rather than President Truman. Liberal anticommunists in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Americans for Democratic Action joined conservatives in attacking the CIO’s leftist-led unions, which the CIO finally expelled in 1949 and 1950 . The expulsions embittered many workers and labor allies, and they did not prevent right-wing groups from associating trade unionism with communism. 22

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.

Changes in the composition of the Supreme Court also dampened the fervor of the anticommunist crusade. Four justices were replaced between 1953 and 1957 , and under Chief Justice Earl Warren the court issued several rulings that limited the mechanisms designed to identify and punish Communists. In 1955 and 1956 , the court held that the federal loyalty program could apply only to employees in sensitive positions. In 1959 , the court struck down the program’s reliance on anonymous informants, giving defendants the right to confront their accusers. 23 Meanwhile, on a single day in 1957 , the court limited the powers of congressional investigating committees, restricted the enforcement of the Smith Act on First Amendment grounds and overturned the convictions of fourteen members of the Communist Party of California, and reinstated John Stewart Service to the State Department, which had dismissed him on loyalty grounds in 1951 . Members of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) accused the Supreme Court of weakening the nation’s defenses against communism, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover angrily labeled June 17, 1957 , “Red Monday.” Civil libertarians, by contrast, welcomed the rulings but regretted that they were based narrowly on procedural questions rather than on broad principles. 24

With McCarthy’s disgrace and the Supreme Court’s restrictions on its machinery, the second Red Scare lost much of its power. One government personnel director opined in 1962 that 90 percent of the people who had been dismissed on loyalty grounds in the early 1950s would have had no difficulty under the same circumstances a decade later. Even so, the damage lasted a long time. The applicant pool for civil service jobs contracted sharply and did not soon recover. Former loyalty defendants, even those who had been cleared, lived the rest of their lives in fear that the old accusations would resurface. Sometimes they did; during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, many talented people were passed over for appointments, not because hiring officials doubted their loyalty, but because appointing them risked politically expensive controversy. 25

The loyalty programs and blacklists wound down, but anticommunism remained a potent force through the 1960s and beyond. After court rulings limited the usefulness of state and national sedition laws against members of the Communist Party, FBI director Hoover launched the secret COINTEL program to monitor and disrupt Communists and others he deemed subversive. Targets soon included participants in the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, and feminist movements. 26 Well into the 1960s, local Red Scares waxed and waned in tandem with challenges to the local status quo, above all in southern contexts where white supremacists battled civil rights activists. Segregationists such as Alabama governor George Wallace and Mississippi senator James Eastland—who not incidentally chaired SISS from 1955 to 1977 —routinely linked race reform to communism and charged that “outside agitators” bent on subverting southern traditions were behind demands for integration and black voting rights. 27

Discussion of the Literature

Scholarship on the second Red Scare has emerged in waves, responding to the availability of new sources, changing historical methodologies, and shifting political contexts. 28

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.” 29 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. 30 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. 31 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. 32

In depicting a top-down Red Scare orchestrated by elites, historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s were out of step with their discipline’s shift toward social history. That disjuncture was soon mitigated by an outpouring of studies of Communist activity at the grassroots, in diverse local contexts usually far removed from foreign affairs. 33

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. 34 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. 35 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. 36

The opening of government records also afforded a clearer view of the machinery of the second Red Scare, and that view has reinforced earlier judgements about its unjust and damaging aspects. In addition to new books on Hoover and the FBI, scholars have produced freshly documented studies of the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), and leading anticommunists and their informants. 37

Scholarship since the late 20th century has tried to transcend the old debates by turning to new approaches. Comparative studies have been useful in exploring the interaction between popular and elite forces in generating and sustaining anticommunism. Michael J. Heale’s analysis of Red Scares in three states identifies a common denominator in the role of political fundamentalists who feared the trend toward a “pluralistic order and a secular, bureaucratizing state.” But local power struggles shaped the timing and target of anticommunist furor. Detroit’s Red Scare erupted as the city’s manufacturing leaders tried to defend their class prerogatives from unions; in Boston, conflict between Catholics and Protestants fueled red-baiting, while Atlanta’s Red Scare became most virulent later, as civil rights activists threatened white supremacy. These and other local- and state-level studies demonstrate that the intensity of Red Scare politics was not a simple function of the strength of the Communist threat. Rather, Red Scares caught fire where rapid change threatened old regimes. Varying mixtures of elite and grassroots forces mobilized to defend local hierarchies, whether of class, religion, race, or gender. 38 International comparisons are bearing fruit too, not least by bringing into sharper relief distinctive aspects of state structure and political development that encouraged or restrained Red Scares. 39

Attention to gender as a category of historical analysis has added another dimension to our understanding of the second Red Scare. The “containment” strategy for halting the spread of communism abroad had a domestic counterpart that prescribed rigid gender roles within the nuclear family. Domestic anticommunism was fueled by widespread anxiety about the perceived threats to American masculinity posed by totalitarianism, corporate hierarchy, and homosexuality. Congressional conservatives used charges of homosexuality—chiefly male homosexuality—in government agencies to serve their own political purposes. High-ranking women in government too were especially frequent targets of loyalty charges, as conservative anticommunists tapped popular hostility to powerful women to rally support for hunting subversives and blocking liberal policies. 40

A related trend in the literature situates McCarthyism within a longer anticommunist tradition. In addition to looking at 19th-century antecedents, early-21st-century work explores the political and institutional continuities between the first and second Red Scares and also notes how conservatives’ deployment of anticommunism to fracture the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition along race and gender lines prefigured the New Right ascendancy under President Ronald Reagan. 41 This longer-term view also has invited further attention to variations within anticommunism, yielding a more nuanced portrait of its diverse conservative, liberal, labor, and socialist camps. 42

Even as they continue to debate the second Red Scare’s origins and sustaining mechanisms, scholars are paying more attention to its effects. Aided by newly accessible materials such as FBI files and the unpublished records of congressional investigating committees, historians are documenting in concrete detail how the fear of communism, and the fear of punishment for association with communism, affected specific individuals, organizations, professions, social movements, public policies, and government agencies. 43 The drive to eliminate communism from all facets and arenas of American life engaged diverse players for many years, and scholars continue to catalogue its direct and indirect consequences.

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. 44 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

The Hollywood Ten ( 1950 documentary)

Point of Order ( 1964 documentary with footage of 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings)

Dies Committee hearings, 1938-1944 (University of Pennsylvania online gateway to Internet Archive and Hathi Trust)

Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations ( McCarthy Hearings 1953–1954 )

Online Documents about McCarthyism at the Truman Presidential Library

Online documents about McCarthyism at the Eisenhower Presidential Library

“M’Carthy Charges Reds Hold U. S. Jobs ,” Wheeling Intelligencer (WV), Feb. 10, 1950

Excerpts from February 1950 Senate Proceedings on Senator Joe McCarthy’s Speech Relating to Communists in the State Department

Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (American Business Consultants, 1950 )

Edward R. Murrow, See It Now: A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (CBS-TV, March 9, 1954 )

Further Reading

• Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective . New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Goldstein, Robert Justin . American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
• Griffith, Robert . The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate . 2d ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
• Haynes, John Earl , and Harvey Klehr . Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Heale, Michael J. McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 . Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
• Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
• Olmsted, Kathryn S. Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
• Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy . New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Schrecker, Ellen . Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America . Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.
• Storrs, Landon R. Y. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
• Theoharis, Athan G. , and John Stuart Cox . The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Inquisition . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.

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

2. On Communist Party membership, see Soviet 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 Harvey Klehr , The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984) ; Robin D. G. Kelley , Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) ; Michael Denning , The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997) ; and Kate Weigand , Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) .

3. Curt Gentry , J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 442 ; and Robert Conquest , The Great Terror: A Reassessment , 40th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) .

4. Ellen Schrecker , Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1994), 3 ; see also Michael Kazin , “The Agony and Romance of the American Left,” 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 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr , In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 134–139 .

5. Chad Pearson, “Fighting the ‘Red Danger’: Employers and Anti-communism,” Athan Theoharis, “The FBI and the Politics of Anti-communism, 1920–1945,” and Michael J. Heale , “Citizens versus Outsiders: Anti-communism at State and Local Levels, 1921–1946,” all in Robert Goldstein , ed., Little “Red Scares”: Anti-communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921–1946 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014) . See also Kim E. Nielsen , Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001) .

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.

8. Ellen Schrecker , 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.”

10. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes , 44; Landon R. Y. Storrs , The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 53–85, 88 .

11. Eleanor Bontecou , 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).

15. Storrs, Second Red Scare , 111, 286–292. On the dismissal of homosexuals, see David Johnson , The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

16. Storrs, Second Red Scare . For different interpretation of the relationship between anticommunism and liberalism, see Jennifer Delton , “Rethinking Post–World War II Anticommunism,” Journal of the Historical Society 10, no. 1 (2010), 1–41 .

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

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

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

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

21. Storrs, Second Red Scare , 186–189.

22. Nelson Lichtenstein , State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) ; and Steven Rosswurm , ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992) .

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.

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

25. Storrs, Second Red Scare , 203–204.

26. Early-21st-century scholarship on COINTELPRO includes David Cunningham , There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) , and Seth Rosenfeld , Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Picador, 2013) .

27. Jeff Woods , Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004) ; and George Lewis , The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945–1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004) .

28. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Ellen Schrecker, “Interpreting McCarthyism: A Bibliographical Essay,” in Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism , and Heale, “Beyond the ‘Age of McCarthy.’” Also see John Earl Haynes , Communism and Anti-communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings (New York: Garland, 1987) .

29. Richard Hofstadter , Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), 41–42 . See also his essay, “The Pseudo-conservative Revolt,” in Daniel Bell , ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion, 1955) .

30. Earl Latham , The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) ; and Alan D. Harper , The Politics of Loyalty: The White House and the Communist Issue, 1946–1952 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1969) .

31. See Athan Theoharis , Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971) . By contrast, see Richard Gid Powers , Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press, 1995) .

32. Kenneth O’Reilly , Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983) ; and Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox , The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988) .

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

34. Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev , The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999) ; and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr , Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999) . These findings stimulated a long list of case studies of various spies and alleged spies, including Harry Dexter White, William Remington, Philip and Mary Jane Keeney, and of course Alger Hiss.

35. John Earl Haynes , 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, Ann Coulter , Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Three Rivers, 2004) ; and M. Stanton Evans , Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (New York: Three Rivers, 2009) .

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

37. For example, John Sbardellati , J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012) ; Athan Theoharis , 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) ; Michael J. Ybarra , Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2004) ; Kathryn S. Olmsted , Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) ; and Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen , Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) .

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

39. Mahoney, “Civil Liberties in Britain during the Cold War”; Ruotsila, British and American Anti-communism before the Cold War ; and Luc van Dongen , Stéphanie Roulin , and Giles Scott-Smith , eds., Transnational Anti-communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) .

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

41. Michael J. Heale , American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) ; Robert Justin Goldstein , Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1978) ; Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares” ; Alex Goodall , 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 .

42. See Jennifer Luff , 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 Judy Kutulas , The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) .

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

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

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53a. McCarthyism

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?"

In the 1950s, thousands of Americans who toiled in the government, served in the army, worked in the movie industry, or came from various walks of life had to answer that question before a congressional panel.

Senator Joseph McCarthy rose to national prominence by initiating a probe to ferret out communists holding prominent positions. During his investigations, safeguards promised by the Constitution were trampled.

Why were so many held in thrall to the Wisconsin lawmaker? Why was an environment that some likened to the Salem witch trials tolerated?

In 1947, President Truman had ordered background checks of every civilian in service to the government. When Alger Hiss , a high-ranking State Department official was convicted on espionage charges, fear of communists intensified.

McCarthy capitalized on national paranoia by proclaiming that communist spies were omnipresent and that he was America's only salvation.

An atmosphere of fear of world domination by communists hung over America in the postwar years. There were fears of a nuclear holocaust based on the knowledge that the Soviet Union exploded its first A-bomb in 1949. That same year, China, the world's most populous nation, became communist. Half of Europe was under Joseph Stalin's influence, and every time Americans read their newspapers there seemed to be a new atomic threat.

At a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia , on February 9, 1950, McCarthy launched his first salvo. He proclaimed that he was aware of 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party who worked for the United States Department of State. A few days later, he repeated the charges at a speech in Salt Lake City. McCarthy soon began to attract headlines, and the Senate asked him to make his case.

McCarthy's Wheeling Speech

At a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, McCarthy proclaimed that he was aware of 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party who worked for the United States Department of State. This speech set off an era of paranoia and accusation and propelled McCarthy into the national spotlight.

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight as we celebrate the one hundred and forty-first birthday of one of the greatest men in American history, I would like to be able to talk about what a glorious day today is in the history of the world. As we celebrate the birth of this man who with his whole heart and soul hated war, I would like to be able to speak of peace in our time, of war being outlawed, and of worldwide disarmament. These would be truly appropriate things to be able to mention as we celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln ....

Five years after a world war has been won, men's hearts should anticipate a long peace, and men's minds should be free from the heavy weight that comes with war. But this is not such a period--for this is not a period of peace. This is a time of the "Cold War." This is a time when all the world is split into two vast, increasingly hostile armed camps--a time of great armaments race ...

Six years ago, at the time of the first conference to map out the peace — Dumbarton Oaks — there was within the Soviet orbit 180,000,000 people. Lined up on the antitotalitarian side there were in the world at that time roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only 6 years later, there are 800,000,000 people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia--an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500,000,000. In other words, in less than 6 years the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5 against us. This indicates the swiftness of the tempo of Communist victories and American defeats in the cold war. As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, "When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within."

The truth of this statement is becoming terrifyingly clear as we see this country each day losing on every front.

At war's end, we were physically the strongest nation on earth and, at least potentially, the most powerful intellectually and morally. Ours could have been the honor of being a beacon on the desert of destruction, a shining living proof that civilization was not yet ready to destroy itself. Unfortunately, we have failed miserably and tragically to arise to the opportunity.

The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this Nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer--the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in Government we can give.

This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been the worst ...

Now I know it is very easy for anyone to condemn a particular bureau or department in general terms. Therefore, I would like to cite one rather unusual case--the case of a man who has done much to shape our foreign policy.

When Chiang Kai-shek was fighting our war, the State Department had in China a young man named John S. Service. His task, obviously, was not to work for the communization of China. Strangely, however, he sent official reports back to the State Department urging that we torpedo our ally Chiang Kai-shek and stating, in effect, that communism was the best hope of China.

Later, this man — John Service — was picked up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for turning over to the communists Secret state Department information. Strangely, however, he was never prosecuted. However, Joseph Grew, the Undersecretary of State, who insisted on his prosecution, was forced to resign. Two days after Grew's successor, Dean Acheson, took over as Undersecretary of State, this man — John Service — who had been picked up by the FBI and who had previously urged that communism was the best hope of China, was not only reinstated in the State Department but promoted. And finally, under Acheson, placed in charge of all placements and promotions.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, this man Service is on his way to represent the State Department and Acheson in Calcutta — by far and away the most important listening post in the Far East ...

Then there was a Mrs. Mary Jane Kenny, from the Board of Economic Warfare in the State Department, who was named in an FBI report and in a House committee report as a courier for the Communist Party while working for the Government. And where do you think Mrs. Kenny is — she is now an editor in the United Nations Document Bureau ...

This, ladies and gentlemen, gives you somewhat of a picture of the type of individuals who have been helping to shape our foreign policy. In my opinion the State Department, which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with Communists.

I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy ...

This brings us down to the case of one Alger Hiss who is more important not as an individual any more, but rather because he is so representative of a group in the State Department ...

If time permitted, it might be well to go into detail about the fact that Hiss was Roosevelt's chief advisor at Yalta when Roosevelt was admittedly in ill health and tired physically and mentally ...

According to the then Secretary of State Stettinius, here are some of the things that Hiss helped to decide at Yalta. (1) The establishment of a European High Commission; (2) the treatment of Germany — this you will recall was the conference at which it was decided that we would occupy Berlin with Russia occupying an area completely circling the city, which, as you know, resulted in the Berlin airlift which cost 31 American lives; (3) the Polish question; ... (6) Iran; (7) China — here's where we gave away Manchuria; (8) Turkish Straits question; (9) international trusteeships; (10) Korea....

I know that you are saying to yourself, "Well, why doesn't the Congress do something about it?" Actually, ladies and gentlemen, one of the important reasons for the graft, the corruption, the dishonesty, the disloyalty, the treason in high Government positions--one of the most important reasons why this continues is a lack of moral uprising on the part of the 140,000,000 American people. In the light of history, however, this is not hard to explain.

It is the result of an emotional hang-over and a temporary moral lapse which follows every war. It is the apathy of evil which people who have been subjected to the tremendous evils of war feel. As the people of the world see mass murder, the destruction of defenseless and innocent people, and all of the crime and lack of morals which go with war, they become numb and apathetic. It has always been thus after war.

However, the morals of our people have not been destroyed. They still exist. This cloak of numbness and apathy has only needed a spark to rekindle them. Happily, this spark has finally been supplied.

As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man [Hiss] guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crime — of being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust. The Secretary of State in attempting to justify his continued devotion to the man who sold out the Christian world to the atheistic world, referred to Christ's Sermon on the Mount as a justification and reason therefore, and the reaction of the American people to this would have made the heart of Abraham Lincoln happy.

When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.

He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers are swept from the national scene so that we may have a new birth of national honesty and decency in government.

On February 20, 1950, McCarthy addressed the Senate and made a list of dubious claims against suspected communists. He cited 81 cases that day. He skipped several numbers, and for some cases repeated the same flimsy information. He proved nothing, but the Senate called for a full investigation. McCarthy was in the national spotlight.

Staying in the headlines was a full-time job. After accusing low-level officials, McCarthy went for the big guns, even questioning the loyalty of Dean Acheson and George Marshall. Some Republicans in the Senate were aghast and disavowed McCarthy.

Others such as Robert Taft and Richard Nixon, saw him as an asset. The public rewarded the witch-hunters by sending red-baiters (communist accusers) before the Senate and the House in 1950.

"Tail Gunner Joe" Shot Down

When Dwight Eisenhower became president, he had no love for McCarthy. Ike was reluctant to condemn McCarthy for fear of splitting the Republican Party. McCarthy's accusations went on into 1954, when the Wisconsin senator focused on the United States Army. For eight weeks, in televised hearings, McCarthy interrogated army officials, including many decorated war heroes.

But this was his tragic mistake. Television illustrated the mean-spiritedness of McCarthy's campaign. The army then went on the attack, questioning McCarthy's methods and credibility. In one memorable fusillade, the Council for the Army simply asked McCarthy, "At long last, have you no sense of decency left?"

Poll after poll showed the American people thought McCarthy unscrupulous in his attack of the army.

Fed up, McCarthy's colleagues censured him for dishonoring the Senate, and the hearings came to a close. Plagued with poor health and alcoholism, McCarthy himself died three years later.

Blacklisting

McCarthy was not the only individual to seek out potential communists.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) targeted the Hollywood film industry. Actors, writers, and producers alike were summoned to appear before the committee and provide names of colleagues who may have been members of the Communist Party.

Those who repented and named names of suspected communists were allowed to return to business as usual. Those who refused to address the committee were cited for contempt. Uncooperative artists were blacklisted from jobs in the entertainment industry. Years passed until many had their reputations restored.

Were there in fact communists in America?

The answer is undoubtedly yes. But many of the accused had attended party rallies 15 or more years before the hearings — it had been fashionable to do so in the 1930s.

Although the Soviet spy ring did penetrate the highest levels of the American government, the vast majority of the accused were innocent victims. All across America, state legislatures and school boards mimicked McCarthy and HUAC. Thousands of people lost their jobs and had their reputations tarnished.

Other Witch-Hunt Victims

Unions were special target of communist hunters. Sensing an unfavorable environment, the AFL ( American Federation of Labor ) and the CIO ( Congress of Industrial Organizations ) merged in 1955 to close ranks. Books were pulled from library shelves, including Robin Hood, which was deemed communist-like for suggesting stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

No politician could consider opening trade with China or withdrawing from Southeast Asia without being branded a communist. Although McCarthyism was dead by the mid-1950s, its effects lasted for decades.

Above all, several messages became crystal clear to the average American: Don't criticize the United States. Don't be different. Just conform.

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McCarthyism Explained: Politics, Fear, and Cold War Context

How can mccarthyism be explained.

McCarthyism, a term synonymous with baseless accusations, public fear, and a dark period of American history, emerges as a topic of great interest and debate among historians and scholars. But what exactly was McCarthyism, and how did it grip the nation with such fervor? To understand the phenomenon, it’s crucial to delve into the intricacies of post-World War II America, a nation grappling with the emerging threat of communism and a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.

At its core, McCarthyism can be defined as the widespread practice of making accusations of subversion or treason, often without adequate evidence. The term derives its name from Senator Joseph McCarthy, who, in the 1950s, became the face of an intense anti-communist campaign that led to numerous professionals being blacklisted and ordinary citizens living in fear of being labeled “un-American.”

This essay aims to unpack the multifaceted reasons behind McCarthyism’s rise and influence. It seeks to argue that McCarthyism can be explained as a synthesis of political opportunism, the public’s palpable fear of communism, and the broader geopolitical tensions of the Cold War era. As we journey through the historical corridors, we’ll shed light on how this seemingly sudden wave of anti-communist sentiment did not emerge in a vacuum, but was a product of its time, deeply intertwined with global events and domestic anxieties.

Historical Background

To truly grasp the genesis of McCarthyism, one must first rewind the historical tape to the immediate aftermath of World War II. The globe, having just emerged from the clutches of a devastating conflict, was witnessing the rise of two major superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union.

Communism, with its ideological roots in Marxism, promised a stateless, classless society, and had found a powerful champion in the Soviet Union. The USSR, under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, was aggressively expanding its sphere of influence, eyeing territories in Eastern Europe and beyond. This expansion was often at odds with Western democratic values, leading to tensions and mistrust between the Soviet bloc and the Western allies.

The Iron Curtain, a term popularized by Winston Churchill, aptly described the ideological, political, and physical barriers that began to form between the East and the West. It was not just a mere metaphor; in many places, there were actual barriers, like the Berlin Wall, that stood as symbols of this division.

While the US and its allies started to rebuild war-torn Europe with initiatives like the Marshall Plan, the specter of communism loomed large. Espionage became a significant concern, with spy rings and secret operations being the order of the day. The fear was not entirely baseless. Notable spy cases, such as the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, further entrenched the public’s perception that there were “enemies within” that threatened the American way of life.

This era was thus marked by a delicate balance of power, where each side was wary of the other’s intentions. The U.S., proud of its democratic ideals, saw itself in a battle, not just for territory but for the very souls of nations, against the creeping shadow of communism.

Political Opportunism

Within the tense atmosphere of post-WWII America, political figures found fertile ground to exploit public fears for personal and political gain. At the forefront of this opportunistic wave was Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name would later become synonymous with the era itself.

McCarthy, a relatively unknown senator from Wisconsin before his anti-communist crusade, recognized the potency of the public’s fear of communism. In a now-infamous 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy claimed to possess a list of communists working within the U.S. State Department. The exact number varied in subsequent retellings, and McCarthy never produced any concrete evidence, but the allegations were enough to catapult him into the national spotlight.

The political climate of the time was conducive to such claims. The Republican Party, keen to regain power from the Democrats, seized upon the issue of communism as a means to criticize the Truman administration for being “soft” on the threat. McCarthy, sensing the prevailing winds, positioned himself as the vanguard against this internal threat.

But McCarthy’s rise was not solely due to his own machinations. The media, particularly the burgeoning television industry, played a pivotal role in amplifying his claims. His hearings and investigations were broadcast nationwide, turning what might have been routine inquiries into dramatic, must-watch events. This media frenzy often sidestepped the need for evidence or due process, instead favoring sensationalism and spectacle.

McCarthy’s methods, which included guilt by association, character assassination, and public interrogations, were more about creating a climate of fear and suspicion than uncovering genuine threats. His targets were often left with tarnished reputations, irrespective of their guilt or innocence. Political opportunism, embodied by McCarthy and his allies, thus became a driving force behind the spread and persistence of McCarthyism.

Public Fear and Paranoia

Beyond the political arena, the everyday lives of American citizens were profoundly impacted by the atmosphere of the era. The Red Scare, which predates McCarthyism and had its first wave post-World War I, had already sowed the seeds of distrust and anxiety regarding communist infiltration.

This pre-existing fear was exacerbated by global events. The fall of China to communism in 1949, the detonation of an atomic bomb by the USSR, and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 all contributed to the perception that communism was not just an external threat but also an insidious internal one. The rhetoric of the time often portrayed it as a domino effect – if one nation fell to communism, others would inevitably follow.

Propaganda played a significant role in shaping public opinion. Films, posters, and school programs warned of the “Red Menace” and urged citizens to be vigilant. This constant barrage of messaging created an environment where neighbor doubted neighbor, and loyalty oaths became commonplace in workplaces, particularly in government positions and the entertainment industry.

Personal accounts from the era reveal the depth of this societal paranoia. Children practiced “duck and cover” drills in schools, preparing for potential nuclear attacks. Families built bomb shelters in their backyards. Individuals accused of having communist affiliations, whether founded or not, faced ostracization, job loss, and sometimes imprisonment. The very fabric of society seemed to be under duress, with trust being a casualty of the times.

This climate of fear was not just the result of external factors but was actively cultivated by individuals and institutions seeking to capitalize on it. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), for instance, conducted high-profile investigations into alleged communist activities, further stoking the fires of public anxiety.

Thus, McCarthyism, while spearheaded by individuals like McCarthy, was as much a product of a society grappling with rapid geopolitical changes, genuine threats, and the manipulation of those genuine concerns for various ends.

Broader Cold War Context

McCarthyism didn’t operate in isolation; it was a manifestation of the larger global tensions of the era, primarily the Cold War. This prolonged period of political tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, spanning from the end of World War II until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, set the stage for the heightened domestic anxieties in the U.S.

The world, post-WWII, was essentially bifurcated into two ideological camps: the capitalist, democratic West led by the United States, and the communist East under the Soviet Union’s guidance. Each superpower viewed the other with suspicion, leading to a series of events that intensified mutual distrust.

The arms race epitomized this rivalry. Both nations rapidly expanded their nuclear arsenals, leading to an ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. This race wasn’t just about military might; it was a symbolic battle, a way for each side to assert its ideological and technological supremacy.

U.S. foreign policy decisions also played into the McCarthyist fervor. The Truman Doctrine, which pledged American support for “free peoples” resisting subjugation by “outside pressures,” effectively set the U.S. on a course to oppose communist expansion everywhere. This doctrine, coupled with events like the Berlin Airlift and the establishment of NATO, signaled the U.S.’s commitment to halting the spread of communism, further reinforcing the domestic narrative of an existential battle between the “free world” and communist forces.

The Cold War also witnessed several flashpoints that heightened fears. The Korean War saw the U.S. directly combatting communist forces, further entrenching the idea of a global struggle against communism. The Cuban Missile Crisis later in 1962 brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, emphasizing the very real dangers of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry.

In this context, it becomes clear that McCarthyism was more than just a domestic phenomenon. It was a reflection of the broader geopolitical dynamics of the time. The fears, while at times exaggerated or manipulated, had a basis in the very real global struggle that defined the better part of the 20th century.

Impact and Legacy

The ripple effects of McCarthyism went far beyond the immediate political theater of the 1950s. Its impact was deeply personal, affecting countless individuals and shaping American society and culture for decades.

Professionals, especially those in the entertainment industry, academia, and government, bore the brunt of McCarthy’s witch hunts. Blacklisting became a tool of retribution, leading many to lose their jobs and careers. Some, under the weight of the accusations and public humiliation, faced personal tragedies, including broken families and even suicides.

But McCarthy’s reign of fear couldn’t last indefinitely. His downfall came in the form of the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. Broadcast to the nation, these hearings exposed McCarthy’s tactics and baseless accusations to public scrutiny. His credibility waned, and the Senate censured him. By 1957, McCarthy was a diminished force, and he passed away, but the shadow of his era lingered.

The legacy of McCarthyism is multifaceted. On the one hand, it serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked power, the erosion of civil liberties, and the perils of mass hysteria. On the other, it’s a testament to the resilience of American institutions and the eventual triumph of truth and justice. Historians and political scientists continue to study this era, drawing lessons for contemporary society.

McCarthyism, a turbulent chapter in American history, serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerability of societies, even robust democracies, to fear and manipulation. Rooted in the broader Cold War context, fueled by political opportunism, and sustained by public paranoia, it left an indelible mark on the American psyche.

As we reflect on this era, it’s essential to recognize the interplay of global events, domestic politics, and societal fears. Understanding this interplay not only offers insights into the past but also provides guidance for the present and future. In a world where geopolitical tensions, ideological battles, and domestic divisions persist, the lessons of McCarthyism remain ever relevant. It underscores the importance of vigilance, critical thinking, and the preservation of fundamental freedoms in the face of fear and demagoguery.

Class Notes and Outline: How can McCarthyism be explained?

At the height of the cold war anti communist sentiment ran high. A second red scare began led by a Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy.

I. McCarthyism – Period of time in the early 1950’s when Senator Joseph McCarthy attempted to expose suspected Communists.

A. Why do you think Americans feared communists in the 50’s? 1. It was the height of the Cold War and Americans increasingly feared that communism would take root in the United States. 2. The Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon in 1949. This intensified US fears of the Soviet Union.

B. What types of actions do you think Americans might have taken against communists?

1. Sen Joseph McCarthy held Senate hearings to “out” suspected communists. 2. Thousands lost their jobs, reputations and lives were destroyed.

C. What is the legacy of McCarthyism?

1. McCarthyism was akin to the red scare, a national paranoia was present. Americans were not truly free to believe what they wanted to believe. 2. McCarthyism is remembered as a time when America engaged in witch hunts. It was a paranoid time and a time when many lives were hurt without any proof. Just to “named” in front of the committee often meant that you would be black listed, your life destroyed.

McCarthy was born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, on November 14, 1908, and educated at Marquette University. He practiced law in Wisconsin until 1939, when he was elected circuit-court judge. During World War II he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, attaining the rank of captain during service in the Pacific theater of operations. In 1946 he was elected on the Republican ticket to the U.S. Senate and was reelected in 1952.

McCarthy first attracted national attention in February 1950, with the charge that the Department of State had been infiltrated by Communists. Although his accusation was never substantiated, during the next three years he repeatedly accused various high-ranking officials, intellectuals and the Hollywood establishment of subversive activities. McCarthy pursued alleged communists with a fervor. He was a master at controlling the media and received enormous publicity. Suspected communists would be hauled in front of McCarthy’s committee like a common criminals, often with no evidence at all. McCarthy’s chief prosecutor was a New York Lawyer named Roy Cohn. Cohn has obnoxious and abrasive. He hated everyone, especially communists and homosexuals. When Cohn and McCarthy had someone in front of their committee they were merciless. They demanded that the “witness” turn in other suspected communists. Since most of the accused were never involved in any communist activity this was difficult. McCarthy would scream “I have a list” and wave a piece of paper demanding information. The list was never made public. Thousands of Americans lost jobs and careers during McCarthy’s witch hunts.

In 1953, as chairman of the Senate subcommittee on investigations, McCarthy continued his probe of alleged Communist activities, and in April 1954 he accused the secretary of the army of concealing foreign espionage activities. In rebuttal the secretary stated that members of the subcommittee staff had threatened army officials in efforts to obtain preferential treatment for a former unpaid consultant of the subcommittee who had been drafted. The secretary of the army had tapes of telephone conversations that recorded Cohn and McCarthy harassing army officials and threatening them with investigations. The tapes also revealed that Cohn had demanded that his assistant G. David Schine, not be called to military service. When Schine was called anyway McCarthy then made his accusations against the army. When the Secretary of the army was called to testify McCarthy attacked a lawyer that had worked for the secretary’s chief counsel (lawyer). The army lawyer Mr. Welch, declared “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…Have you no sense of decency sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?” McCarthy was exposed for the fraud he was.

During the ensuing Senate investigations, which were widely publicized in the press and given nationwide radio and television coverage, McCarthy was cleared of the charges against him but was censured (punished) by the Senate for the methods he had used in his investigations and for his abuse of certain senators and Senate committees. His influence both in the Senate and on the national political scene diminished steadily thereafter. McCarthy remained in the Senate until his death in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 2, 1957. Roy Cohn outlived his mentor and returned to practice law in New York City. He specialized in getting big divorce settlements for rich women. Cohn lost his fortune when the IRS discovered he hadn’t paid his taxes. Cohn died of AIDS on August 2, 1986.

• McCarthyism / The "Red Scare"
• Online Documents

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was a little-known junior senator from Wisconsin until February 1950 when he claimed to possess a list of 205 card-carrying Communists employed in the U.S. Department of State. From that moment Senator McCarthy became a tireless crusader against Communism in the early 1950s, a period that has been commonly referred to as the "Red Scare." As chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee, Senator McCarthy conducted hearings on communist subversion in America and investigated alleged communist infiltration of the Armed Forces. His subsequent exile from politics coincided with a conversion of his name into a modern English noun "McCarthyism," or adjective, "McCarthy tactics," when describing similar witch hunts in recent American history. [The American Heritage Dictionary gives the definition of McCarthyism as: 1. The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence; and 2. The use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition.] Senator McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate on December 2, 1954 and died May 2, 1957.

Draft page, "Sixth Draft" of Eisenhower speech given on October 3, 1952 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on "Communism and Freedom" [Stephen Benedict Papers, Box 4, 10-3-52 Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1); NAID #16614761] (The deleted paragraph refers to accusations made by McCarthy against General George C. Marshall and was removed from the speech to avoid causing bad feelings in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin.)

Letter, Senator Joseph McCarthy to President Eisenhower re James B. Conant as High Commissioner in Germany, February 3, 1953 [DDE's Papers as President, Name Series, Box 22, McCarthy Joseph; NAID #16660398]

Letter, President Eisenhower to friend, Harry Bullis, May 18, 1953 [DDE's Records as President, Official File, Box 317, OF 99-R McCarthy, Hon. Joeseph R.; NAID #16702985]

Letter, President Eisenhower to friend, Swede Hazlett, July 21, 1953 (pages 3 and 4 only) [DDE's Papers as President, Name Series, Box 18, Hazlett Swede 1953 (1); NAID #16610971]

Letter, President Eisenhower to his brother, Milton Eisenhower, October 9, 1953 (page 3 only) [DDE's Papers as President, Name Series, Box 12, Eisenhower Milton 1952-1953 (3); NAID #16660401]

Daily Notes by C.D. Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to President Eisenhower, November 27, 1953 [C.D. Jackson Papers, Box 68, Log 1953 (5); NAID #16702995]

Daily Notes by C.D. Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to the President, November 30, 1953 [C.D. Jackson Papers, Box 68, Log 1953 (5); NAID #16702996]

Memorandum, Stanley M. Rumbough Jr. and Charles Masterson, Special Assistants in the White House, to Murray Snyder, Assistant White House Press Secretary, about responding to Senator McCarthy, December 1, 1953 [DDE's Records as President, Official File, Box 317, OF99-R McCarthy, Hon. Joseph R.; NAID #16702981]

Daily Notes by C.D. Jackson, Speechwriter and Special Assistant to the President, December 2, 1953 [C.D. Jackson Papers, Box 68, Log 1953 (5); NAID #16702997]

Diary entries by James C. Hagerty, White House Press Secretary [James C. Hagerty Papers, Box 1, January 1-April 6, 1954]

Diary entry, February 25, 1954 ; NAID #16703016 Diary entry, March 8, 1954 ; NAID #16703018 Diary entry, March 10, 1954 ; NAID #16703019 Diary entry, March 24, 1954 ; NAID #16703020

Diary entries by James C. Hagerty, White House Press Secretary [James C. Hagerty Papers, Box 1, May 1954]

Diary entry, May 12, 1954 ; NAID #16703022 Diary entry, May 13, 1954 ; NAID #16703024 Diary entry, May 14, 1954 ; NAID #16703025 Diary entry, May 17, 1954 ; NAID #16703026 Diary entry, May 28, 1954 ; NAID #16703027 Diary entry, May 30, 1954 ; NAID #16703029 Diary entry, May 31, 1954 ; NAID #16703030

Letter, President Eisenhower to Secretary of Defense regarding testimony of Defense Department employees, May 17, 1954 [DDE's Papers as President, Administration Series, Box 25, McCarthy Letters; NAID #16702983]

Notes by L. Arthur Minnich, Assistant White House Staff Secretary [White House Office of the Staff Secretary, L. Arthur Minnich Series, Box 1, Miscellaneous Mc]

Staff Notes on Senator Joseph McCarthy, May 22, 1953 ; NAID #16703043 Staff Notes on Senator Joseph McCarthy, July 15, 1953 ; NAID #16703044 Staff Notes on Senator Joseph McCarthy, July 29, 1953 ; NAID #16703045 Staff Notes on the McCarthy Hearings and the Privacy of Personal Advice, May 17, 1954 ; NAID #16703046 Staff Notes on Senator Joseph McCarthy, November 19, 1954 ; NAID #16703047 Staff Notes on McCarthyism, June 21, 1955 ; NAID #16703048

Letter, Asst. Secretary of Defense Fred Seaton to Senator McCarthy regarding accusations of Communists working in defense facilities, June 3, 1954 [Fred Seaton Papers, FAS Eyes Only Series, Box 4, McCarthy (1); NAID #16703231]

Diary entry by James Hagerty, White House Press Secretary [James C. Hagerty Papers, Box 1, June 1954]

Diary entry, June 8, 1954 ; NAID #16703041

Memo by Ann Whitman regarding events leading up to so-called "break" made by McCarthy, December 7, 1954 [DDE's Papers as President, Administration Series, Box 25, McCarthy Letters; NAID #16702984]

Senate Resolution (S. Res. 116) introduced by Senator Joseph McCarthy, June 20, 1955 [White House Office of the Staff Secretary, L. Arthur Minnich Series, Box 1, Miscellaneous Mc; NAID #16703049]

Secondary Sources:

The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1963.

Who Killed Joe McCarthy? by William B. Ewald, Jr., Simon and Schuster, New York, 1984.

Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective by Richard M. Fried, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990.

The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate by Robert Griffith, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1970.

Joseph McCarthy: The Politics of Chaos by Mark Landis, Susquehanna University Press, Selinsgrove, 1987.

McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin by Michael O'Brien, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 1980.

A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy by David Oshinsky, Free Press, New York; Collier Macmillan, London, 1983.

Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America by Ellen Schrecker, Little, Brown, Boston, 1998.

Additional Information:

McCarthyism Subject Guide

Photographs:

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Ellen Schrecker, Phillip Deery (2016), The Age of McCarthyism. A Brief History with Documents (3rd ed.), Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press (ISBN-10: 1-319-05018-2).

Publisher's blurb: Incorporating important recent scholarship, this popular supplement combines a comprehensive essay on the history of McCarthyism with compelling documents that trace the course of anti-Communist furor in the U.S. The volume’s 95-page essay follows the campaign against domestic subversion from its origins in the 1930s through its escalation in the 1940s to its decline in the 1950s. The second part includes over 47 original documents (including 6 new sources) — congressional transcripts, FBI reports, speeches, and letters — that chronicle the anti-Communist crusade. The essay and documents have been thoroughly updated to reflect new scholarship and recently revealed archival evidence of Soviet spying in the U.S. Also included are headnotes to the documents, 15 black-and-white photographs, a glossary, a chronology of McCarthyism, a revised bibliographical essay, and an index.

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122 McCarthyism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

McCarthyism, named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, refers to the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence. This dark period in American history, which peaked in the 1950s, saw many individuals being unfairly targeted and persecuted for their political beliefs or associations.

If you are studying McCarthyism or simply interested in learning more about this infamous chapter in American history, here is a list of 122 essay topic ideas and examples to help you get started:

• The origins and rise of McCarthyism in the United States
• The role of fear and paranoia in fueling McCarthyism
• The impact of McCarthyism on American society and politics
• The tactics and strategies employed by Joseph McCarthy in his anti-communist crusade
• The Hollywood blacklist and its effects on the film industry
• The role of the media in perpetuating McCarthyism
• The parallels between McCarthyism and other historical witch hunts
• The legacy of McCarthyism in contemporary American politics
• The impact of McCarthyism on civil liberties and free speech in America
• The psychological effects of living in a climate of fear and suspicion
• The influence of McCarthyism on Cold War policies and attitudes
• The international repercussions of McCarthyism on U.S. foreign relations
• The role of women in the anti-communist movement during the McCarthy era
• The experiences of African Americans during the McCarthy era
• The impact of McCarthyism on the labor movement in America
• The role of religion in the anti-communist crusade
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted LGBTQ individuals
• The role of the FBI in promoting McCarthyism
• The impact of McCarthyism on the academic community
• The ways in which McCarthyism affected the arts and literature
• The experiences of individuals who were blacklisted during the McCarthy era
• The role of McCarthyism in shaping Cold War propaganda
• The impact of McCarthyism on immigration policies in the United States
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted Asian Americans
• The role of the House Un-American Activities Committee in promoting McCarthyism
• The impact of McCarthyism on the civil rights movement
• The role of anti-Semitism in the McCarthy era
• The experiences of LGBTQ individuals during the McCarthy era
• The impact of McCarthyism on the LGBTQ rights movement
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted women
• The role of gender in the anti-communist crusade
• The impact of McCarthyism on the feminist movement
• The experiences of women who were targeted during the McCarthy era
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted people of color
• The role of race in the anti-communist crusade
• The experiences of people of color who were targeted during the McCarthy era
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted immigrants
• The role of xenophobia in the anti-communist crusade
• The experiences of immigrants who were targeted during the McCarthy era
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted religious minorities
• The impact of McCarthyism on religious freedoms in America
• The role of anti-Catholicism in the anti-communist crusade
• The experiences of religious minorities who were targeted during the McCarthy era
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted labor unions
• The role of anti-labor sentiment in the anti-communist crusade
• The experiences of union members who were targeted during the McCarthy era
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted intellectuals and academics
• The role of anti-intellectualism in the anti-communist crusade
• The experiences of intellectuals and academics who were targeted during the McCarthy era
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted artists and writers
• The impact of McCarthyism on the arts and literature
• The role of censorship in the anti-communist crusade
• The experiences of artists and writers who were targeted during the McCarthy era
• The ways in which McCarthyism targeted journalists and media professionals
• The impact of McCarthyism on the media industry
• The role of propaganda in the anti-communist crusade
• The experiences of journalists and media professionals who were targeted during the McCarthy era
• The impact of McCarthyism on LGBTQ rights in America
• The role of homophobia in the anti-communist crusade
• The experiences of LGBTQ individuals who were targeted during the McCarthy era
• The impact of McCarthyism on women's rights in America
• The role of sexism in the anti-communist crusade
• The impact of McCarthyism on civil rights for people of color in America
• The role of racism in the anti-communist crusade
• The role of religious bigotry in the anti-communist crusade

These essay topic ideas and examples cover a wide range of aspects of McCarthyism and its impact on American society. Whether you are interested in exploring the political, social, or cultural dimensions of this period, there is plenty of material here to inspire your research and writing. So dive in, and start exploring the complex and troubling history of McCarthyism in the United States.

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Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods

At the start of 1950, Joseph McCarthy’s political future did not look promising. McCarthy had been elected senator from Wisconsin in 1946, after switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and running as a decorated Marine veteran with the nickname Tail Gunner Joe. Even then, he had a reputation as a scofflaw. He had exaggerated his war record. He first ran for Senate (and lost) while he was still in uniform, which was against Army regulations, and he ran his second Senate campaign while he was a sitting judge, a violation of his oath. Questions had been raised about whether he had dodged his taxes and where his campaign funds had come from.

When McCarthy got to Washington, he became known as a tool of business interests, accepting a loan from Pepsi-Cola in exchange for working to end sugar rationing (he paid it back), and money from a construction company in exchange for opposing funding for public housing (which he eventually voted for). He plainly had no ethical or ideological compass, and most of his colleagues regarded him as a troublemaker, a loudmouth, and a fellow entirely lacking in senatorial politesse.

So when, in 1950, Lincoln’s birthday came around, a time of year when the Republican Party traditionally sent its elected officials out to speak at fund-raisers around the country, McCarthy was assigned to venues where it was clearly hoped that he would attract little notice. His first stop was the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club, in Wheeling, West Virginia, then a diehard Democratic state.

McCarthy didn’t know what he was going to talk about (he never planned very far ahead), so he brought notes for a couple of speeches: one about housing for veterans, and one, consisting mostly of clippings cobbled together by a speechwriter, about Communists in the government. McCarthy had seemingly had very little to do with that second speech, but he decided to go with it.

It is not known exactly what McCarthy said in Wheeling, and he later claimed that he couldn’t find his copy of the speech. But a local paper reported him as having waved a piece of paper on which, he said, were the names of two hundred and five Communists working in the State Department. The story was picked up by the Associated Press, and soon it was everywhere.

McCarthy had, in fact, no such list. He did not have even a single name. He may have calculated that a dinner speech at a women’s club in West Virginia was a safe place to try out the “I have in my hand” gimmick, and, somewhat to his surprise, it worked. In subsequent appearances on his Lincoln’s-birthday circuit, he gave the same speech, though the numbers changed. In Reno, the list had fifty-seven names. It didn’t matter. He had grabbed the headlines, and that was all he cared about. He would dominate them for the next four and a half years. Wheeling was McCarthy’s Trump Tower escalator. He tossed a match and started a bonfire.

Larry Tye’s purpose in his new biography, “ Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy ” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is to make the case that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century Joe McCarthy. Tye draws on some fresh sources, including McCarthy’s papers, which are deposited at Marquette, his alma mater, and unpublished memoirs by McCarthy’s wife, Jean, and his longtime aide James Juliana, who served as his chief investigator.

Tye also quotes from transcripts of the executive sessions (that is, hearings closed to the public) of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee, which McCarthy essentially hijacked in 1953 and put to the business of exposing Communists in the government.

Tye describes these transcripts—almost nine thousand pages—as “recently unveiled . . . and never before closely examined.” This is a little misleading. The transcripts were released in 2003, and they have been quoted from extensively, notably by Ted Morgan, in “ Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America .”

But they are important. The other senators on McCarthy’s subcommittee stopped attending the hearings, since McCarthy dominated everything, and so it became his personal star chamber. He could subpoena anyone (Tye says he called five hundred and forty-six witnesses in the year and a half he ran the show), and was answerable to no one. These transcripts give us McCarthy unbound. As for Tye’s McCarthy-Trump comparison? He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny.

McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. He cared little which they did, nor did he care that, in his entire career as a Communist-hunter, he never sent a single “subversive” to jail. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.

McCarthy had the support of a media conglomerate, the Hearst papers, which amplified everything he said, and he had cheerleaders in the commentariat, such as the columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell, both of whom reached millions of readers in a time when relatively few households (in 1952, about a third) had a television set. He tried to block a hostile newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal , from his press conferences, and he egged on the crowds at his rallies to harass the reporters.

Right from the start, McCarthy had prominent critics. But almost the entire political establishment was afraid of him. You could fight him, in which case he just made your life harder, or you could ignore him, in which case he rolled right over you. He verbally abused people who disagreed with him. He also had easy access to money, much of it from Texas oilmen, which he used to help unseat politicians who crossed him.

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To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong. Tye quotes the pollster George Gallup, in 1954: “Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him.” His fans liked that he was a bully, and they liked that he scandalized the genteel and the privileged.

McCarthy forced government agencies, by the constant threat of investigations, to second-guess appointments, and to fire people he had smeared just because he had smeared them. He didn’t need to prove anything, and he almost never did, because it didn’t matter. Your name in McCarthy’s mouth was the kiss of death. He was a destroyer of careers.

To call McCarthy a conspiracy theorist is giving him too much credit. He was more like a conspiracy-monger. He had one pitch, which he trotted out on all occasions. It was that American governmental and educational institutions had been infiltrated by a secret network of Communists and Communist sympathizers, and that these people were letting Stalin and Mao have their way in Europe and Asia, and were working to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship.

What distinguished McCarthy’s claims was their outlandishness. He didn’t attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy. In 1951, he claimed that George Marshall, the Secretary of Defense, the former Secretary of State, and the author of the Marshall Plan, had been, throughout his career, “always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin.” Marshall, he said, sat at the center of “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”

Even Republicans were aghast. Marshall was almost universally regarded as a selfless public servant and a model of personal probity. The leader of the Party’s conservative wing, Robert Taft, expressed regret that McCarthy had overstated his case. But that was about as far as most Republicans had the nerve to go. Nothing came of McCarthy’s attack. For McCarthy, though, the important thing was that he had said something that was manifestly preposterous and had got away with it. He must have realized that he could get away with anything.

McCarthy lied all the time. He lied even when he didn’t need to lie, as Tye thinks is the case with the war record. When he didn’t have any facts to embellish, he made them up. He found that, if he just kept on repeating himself, people would figure that he must be onto something.

He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.

At the end, when he was about to be condemned by the Senate for his behavior toward his colleagues, he was invited to sign letters of apology that would probably have got him off the hook. He refused, and is supposed to have thrown the pen across the room. He was like the Don in Mozart’s opera: he preferred eternal damnation to admitting that he had ever been wrong.

Like many bamboozlers who succeed by preying on the earnest and the credulous, McCarthy was easily bamboozled. He often tied witnesses who had little to hide in knots, but the actual spies who testified (and there were one or two) completely fooled him. He hired rashly, and he valued loyalty over ability. He was also loyal to those he believed were loyal to him—and that, ironically, turned out to be his undoing.

I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, but, to a certain extent, McCarthy is a scapegoat. His excesses and his political vulgarity have made him a convenient symbol of Cold War anti-Communism—its ideological intolerance, its disregard for civil liberties, its exaggerated warnings about Communist infiltration and expansion. But McCarthy was responsible for none of those things. The work he is credited with doing—purging the government of spies and “security risks,” typically people suspected of Communist sympathies—had already been done before he got up to speak in Wheeling.

This is the main reason (along with his general disorderliness) that no one McCarthy investigated was ever convicted of anything. There were almost no Communists left to fire or spies left to convict. McCarthy can be blamed for continuing the official practice of witch-hunting long past the point it made any sense, but he cannot be blamed for creating it. The blame for that rests with a man who hated McCarthy, Harry Truman.

After the war ended, in 1945, it was not immediately clear what our future relations with the Soviet Union would be. But, by early 1947, many in the American government had concluded that the Soviet Union was a hostile power, and that Communist parties in Western Europe were threats to democracy there.

On March 12th, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, Truman relieved the situation of any remaining ambiguity. He announced that it was the policy of the United States “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” “Armed minorities” meant Communist insurgents, and “outside pressures” meant the Kremlin. The policy was quickly named the Truman Doctrine. That speech was the start of the Cold War.

Nine days later, Truman signed an executive order establishing the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which tasked the F.B.I. and other agencies with undertaking investigations of government employees suspected of disloyalty—specifically, anyone with “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group, or combination of persons, designated by the Attorney General as totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.” According to the Columbia scholar Ira Katznelson, between 1947 and 1953, 4,765,705 federal employees had to fill out forms initiating loyalty investigations. Of these employees, 26,236 were referred for further scrutiny, and five hundred and sixty were fired or not hired. Homosexuals were targeted as security risks (being vulnerable to blackmail) or as generally undesirable. There were no anti-discrimination laws to protect them. They were simply fired.

At the same time, Congress began its own loyalty investigations. Hearings on Communists in Hollywood, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC ), began in October, 1947, and resulted in the convictions for contempt of Congress of the so-called Hollywood Ten, all of whom served prison terms. The following July, Elizabeth Bentley, a former member of the American Communist Party (C.P.U.S.A.), gave HUAC the names of American spies, among them Harry Dexter White, formerly a senior official in the Treasury Department.

A month later, another ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers, gave testimony that led to the most spectacular unmasking of the anti-Communist crusade, that of the former high-level State Department official Alger Hiss . Hiss was convicted of perjury in January, 1950, and sent to prison. The same month, an atomic spy ring was busted when the physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to being a member. His confession would lead, in 1951, to the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for espionage, and, in 1953, to their execution.

There were spies to be caught. The historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, who have examined documents from K.G.B. files and from the Venona project—in which the U.S. government intercepted coded messages from Soviet intelligence agencies—say that more than five hundred Americans gave intelligence to the Soviets.

Rooting out spies and informants was therefore a perfectly sensible policy, and that part did not take long. The problem was that the process didn’t stop there. It was allowed to sweep up people who had only a notional connection to national security, like high-school teachers and Hollywood screenwriters. It licensed anti-Communist groups of all types—official (government agencies), quasi-official (educational and ecclesiastical authorities), and pseudo-official (editorialists and ad-hoc organizations)—to pursue their own investigations. And it constantly redefined what made a person a security risk or disloyal.

Espionage was a crime. But it was not a crime to be a member of the C.P.U.S.A. Communists had been on the ballot in every Presidential election from 1924 to 1940. Nor was it a crime to be a fellow-traveller or to belong to a front organization. “Front” and “fellow-traveller” were terms of art, anyway; they meant whatever the authorities in charge of an investigation said they did. By 1950, most of the people caught up in the investigations had already ended their relations with the C.P.U.S.A. and with radical politics generally. Many were committed anti-Communists. But their past was used to brand them as disloyal.

McCarthy had nothing to do with any of this. By the time he took charge of his subcommittee, in 1953, the C.P.U.S.A. was moribund, and the Soviets had run out of sympathetic Americans willing to give them intelligence, and had resorted to conventional means of spycraft.

McCarthy was therefore reduced to making national-security mountains out of molehills like Edward Rothschild, a bookbinder in the Government Printing Office who might have pilfered some classified documents but who had no access to atomic secrets. Rothschild seems to have been the only plausible security risk that McCarthy ever uncovered; he lost his job, but he was never prosecuted.

The case of Irving Peress was another McCarthy extravaganza. Peress was a dentist, drafted by the Army in 1952 because the Army needed dentists. He had declined to answer a question about his political affiliations on his loyalty questionnaire, and he may have had some prior connection to the C.P.U.S.A. But he had no access to secret information—he fixed teeth—and by the time McCarthy got to him, at the end of 1953, he was due to be discharged.

McCarthy made up for the smallness of the fry he was nabbing by claiming that these people had been hired and promoted by higher-ups who knew all about their Communist connections. Peress, McCarthy announced, was part of “the deliberate Communist infiltration of our Armed Forces.”

This case of overkill is one of the things that brought McCarthy to his Waterloo, the Army-McCarthy hearings, held in the spring of 1954 and followed, Tye estimates, by eighty million Americans, half the population. The hearings had nothing to do with Communism. Their purpose was to determine whether the chief counsel on McCarthy’s subcommittee, Roy Cohn, had put improper pressure on the Army to give special treatment to another member of McCarthy’s staff, a wealthy nonentity named David Schine, after Schine was drafted. As he always did when attacked, McCarthy punched right back, countercharging that the Army had been holding Private Schine hostage—putting him on K.P. duty, threatening to send him overseas—in order to get McCarthy’s subcommittee to drop its investigations into the Communist infiltration of the armed services.

It was obvious that Cohn had made threats in an effort to get Schine excused from the ordinary duties of life as an Army private. On the behind-the-scenes advice of President Dwight Eisenhower, who loathed McCarthy, the Army had compiled a detailed chronology of Cohn’s many phone calls to and meetings with Army officials, and a list of his demands. There was no way McCarthy was going to win that argument.

And yet McCarthy didn’t do what almost anyone else would have done. He didn’t throw Schine and Cohn under the bus. McCarthy knew that Schine was worthless, but he also knew that Cohn was deeply attached to him, and McCarthy valued Cohn as a man who was as free of scruples as he was. McCarthy put his career at risk for Schine and Cohn, and he lost. It may have been honor among scoundrels, but it was honor, of a sort.

The most interesting thing about the hearings, looking back, is the story behind the celebrated dénouement, an exchange between McCarthy and the Army’s hired counsel Joseph Welch, seen by millions on television, and by many people afterward in Emile de Antonio’s documentary “Point of Order!” It began when McCarthy, incensed by what he regarded as Welch’s overly aggressive examination of Cohn, revealed that a young lawyer named Fred Fisher, at Hale & Dorr, where Welch practiced, had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization accused of being a Communist front.

Welch was a crafty courtroom performer of the “I’m just a simple country lawyer” variety, and he put on his best basset-hound face. “Until this moment, Senator,” he said, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy spoke up again, repeating things he had just said about Fisher. Welch tried to stop him. “Senator, may we not drop this?” he asked. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Again, McCarthy refused to change the subject. Welch let him talk. “Mr. McCarthy,” he said finally, when McCarthy was done, “I will not discuss this further with you. . . . If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good.” The room erupted in applause. Even reporters applauded. It was June 9, 1954, the thirtieth day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. The dragon had been slain.

What had actually happened is that the bamboozler was bamboozled. It was not McCarthy who had outed Fred Fisher. It was Joseph Welch. The whole Fisher story had appeared two months before in a front-page article in the Times . “Mr. Welch today confirmed news reports,” the Times said, “that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher, Jr., of his own Boston law office because of admitted membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell, Jr., the Attorney General, as a Communist-front organization.” The article was accompanied by a photograph of Fisher. Welch’s lament that McCarthy had ruined Fisher’s reputation was bogus. Fred Fisher was a trap, and McCarthy walked right into it. It has been said that when Welch left the hearing room, with tears in his eyes, he winked at a reporter he knew. I doubt he did this, but he was certainly entitled to.

The hearings had lasted a hundred and eighty-seven hours—long enough for McCarthy to make himself sufficiently toxic in the public mind for the Senate to do something about him. A committee was appointed to prepare charges for a vote of censure. In the end, in a classic profile in senatorial courage, the decision was made to “condemn” McCarthy for a single offense, which was not that he had destroyed the careers of dozens of public servants, or that he had used congressional immunity to libel people, but that he had behaved disrespectfully to other senators. The vote was 67–22. Senator John F. Kennedy, whose younger brother Bobby had served on McCarthy’s staff, did not vote. Back trouble, he explained, had prevented him from coming to the floor.

The vote had no practical consequences. Although McCarthy was relieved of his chairmanship when the Democrats gained control of the Senate, he could have gone on. But the other senators had a way of punishing him that was more effective than condemnation, and, conveniently, less visible to voters. They shunned him. When McCarthy rose to speak, they wandered off the floor. When he approached groups in the cloakroom, they disbanded.

McCarthy had never cared what kind of attention he got, as long as he got it, and he could not handle being ignored. He had always assumed—people found this one of the most twisted things about him—that he could continue to pal around with men whose reputations he had trashed. Already a heavy drinker, he descended further into alcoholism, and he died on May 2, 1957, in Bethesda Naval Hospital. Hepatitis was given as the cause of death; Tye thinks, based on the medical records, that this is wrong, and that McCarthy died of alcohol withdrawal—the D.T.s. Either way, he drank himself to death. He was forty-eight.

Many national politicians would probably have been happy to drop loyalty investigations after 1953, but no one wanted to speak out against them. It was not an issue one could afford to be on the wrong side of. So subversive-hunting lasted until 1957, when a series of Supreme Court opinions curtailed the power of government agencies to inquire into the political beliefs of citizens. The reign of inquiry had lasted ten years. Joseph McCarthy was only one episode in that miserable saga.

Tye wisely does not propose to draw many lessons for today from the story of McCarthy’s career. Our demagogue is far more dangerous than a senator who was not very popular even in his own state. Ours is the President, and he has henchmen running the State Department and the Justice Department who are dedicated to clearing a legal path for him to eliminate whoever stands in his way. The Trump Administration has done serious damage to the entire executive branch. It will take a long time to repair it.

But what is puzzling about McCarthy is also puzzling about Trump. Once McCarthy was in a position of power, he was incapable of modifying his behavior. He could not shut it off, even when everyone around him was begging him to. He had a single explanation for everything, and the only way he knew how to do his job was by threatening and prevaricating. Trump, too, is a one-trick pony. He says the same things on every issue and in response to every crisis.

Voters get tired of one-trick ponies. Not every civil servant with progressive views can be a spy, despite McCarthy’s insistence, just as not every story Trump finds unflattering can be fake, and not every investigation he dislikes can be a hoax. Endlessly recycled charges lose their sting. That is what happened to McCarthy. It was not that the public decided that Communists were not a real danger. They just got sick of the constant snarling and browbeating. They wanted it to go away.

When Joseph Welch arrived in Washington for the famous hearings, some of the people involved in the Army’s defense were shocked that he did not seem to have studied the case. They worried that he was unprepared. But Welch knew that he could not beat McCarthy on the facts, because McCarthy would just make up new facts. He saw that the only way to destroy McCarthy was to give him the opportunity to destroy himself. He let McCarthy rant and bully and interrupt for thirty days, and then, as the clock was winding down, he closed in for the kill. It was pure rope-a-dope, and a lesson, possibly, for Joe Biden. ♦

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Mccarthyism: from The Tragedy to America’s Triumph

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McCarthyism and The Crucible: What to Know

Book Guides

In studying The Crucible , you will inevitably be faced with questions about the play's connections to the "Red Scare" of the 1950s and the phenomenon known as McCarthyism. These connections are important because they demonstrate that The Crucible is not merely a (highly adapted) retelling of historical events but also an allegorical reference to the timelessness of certain central human flaws.

In this article, I'll provide historical background on McCarthyism, tell you about Arthur Miller's personal involvement with the investigations of alleged communists in the 1950s, and explain how and why interpretations of The Crucible are so closely tied to the political attitudes and events of that decade.

Background on McCarthyism

Let’s start off with some background on who Joseph McCarthy was and what role he played in American politics. McCarthy was a Republican from Wisconsin who rose through the political ranks in the 1940s and was elected to the Senate in 1946. When it looked like he might not be reelected in 1950 after a few unremarkable years of service, he decided to try a new political strategy: targeting communist subversives.

To see why this was even an option, you have to understand the political climate at the time. The 1950s marked the beginning of the Cold War, an era of great tension between the US and the communist USSR. Conservatives in the US feared that anyone who had any affiliation with the Communist Party was a potential threat to national security because they couldn’t be trusted to remain loyal to the US. McCarthy was able to use this fear to his advantage.

On February 9, 1950, he claimed to possess a list of the names of 205 people in the US State Department who were members of the American Communist Party. The public, in the throes of a communist hysteria, demanded an investigation of these supposed agitators within the government. Though many of the people on McCarthy’s list were not, in fact, communists, he still managed to become the chairman of an organization called the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, which proceeded to investigate "dissenters." These investigations went on for two years, during which the questioning spread to numerous government departments, and there was a continued proliferation of communist panic. This persecution of alleged subversives became known colloquially as "McCarthyism."

McCarthy finally lost power in 1954 soon after proposing an investigation of the military to root out communists. President Eisenhower, who never liked McCarthy and had great respect for the military as a former commander, decided things had finally gone too far. He worked behind the scenes to discredit McCarthy. The Army sent inside information about McCarthy’s abuses of power to his critics, and a storm of bad PR finally led to the loss of his position as chairman of the investigatory committee. He died soon after in 1957, four years after the opening of The Crucible .

Though the modern-day witch hunt philosophy carries his namesake, Joseph McCarthy was far from the only driving force behind the investigation of suspected communists during the Cold War. Another congressional group called the House UnAmerican Activities Committee played a similar and, some would argue, even more dramatic role at the same time. HUAC was a congressional committee originally established in 1938 with the primary goal of investigating communist and fascist organizations that had become active during the Great Depression.

After World War II, as Cold War tensions mounted, HUAC became even more intent on investigating communist activities. HUAC gained significant power in tandem with McCarthy; in fact, HUAC provided inspiration for many of McCarthy’s tactics. Members of the committee were convinced that disloyal communists had managed to infiltrate the US government, educational system, and entertainment industry. Anyone deemed suspicious was issued a subpoena by the committee and subsequently questioned about their political activities and the activities of other potential subversives. People who refused to answer these questions or name any names were arrested for contempt of Congress and even sent to jail. Many were subsequently denied employment opportunities in their industries because they were universally "blacklisted" or shut out by employers who feared that hiring them would be a public relations nightmare.

Arthur Miller’s Connections to McCarthyism

Arthur Miller had great distaste for McCarthy’s investigations in the early 1950s, and he claims to have written The Crucible in 1953 largely as a reaction to this tense political climate. He had become fascinated with the environment of paranoia and how it affected society as a whole. When he stumbled upon the story of the Salem witch trials, he finally came up with a way to express those themes on stage. The Crucible was also a reaction his personal disappointment at the decision of his friend, director Elia Kazan, to name some former colleagues as communists in 1952 in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Many believe The Crucible's high profile as a criticism of McCarthyism partially led to Miller’s own investigation by HUAC.

In 1956, Miller was subpoenaed by HUAC after attempting to renew his passport before traveling to Belgium for the opening of The Crucible. He was suspected (not incorrectly) of possessing close ties to the American Communist Party. Miller did in fact write communist theater criticism and was a greater private supporter of communism than he portrayed himself to be at the time, but he never actually joined the party. When he appeared before HUAC, Miller refused to name anyone else who was involved in "subversive" political activities. To be fair, Miller had less at stake than many others who were called before HUAC to testify. Because he worked mainly in theater, he didn't have to worry as much about the effects Hollywood's unforgiving blacklist policy would have on his career. Miller was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to betray his peers, but the ruling was overturned two years later as HUAC lost power and relevance.

The Crucible as an Allegory for McCarthyism

It’s not difficult to see the parallels between McCarthyism and The Crucible 's plot. The abandonment of reason in the face of hysteria is a clear common theme. Arthur Miller wrote an essay in 1996 entitled "Why I Wrote The Crucible: An Author’s Answer to Politics" that provides insight into his view of the play’s connections to the communist panic.

Early in the essay, he relates the US State Department’s fear of China after the communist takeover to the fear of black magic in The Crucible . Miller writes, "There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue." Miller saw these sorts of irrational thought processes (weeding out officials associated with China in the US government with the goal of diminishing China’s power overall) as corollaries to the supernatural beliefs of his characters.

As communist hysteria built, Miller was even more convinced that he wanted to write a play based on this form of collective insanity. He was especially fascinated by people who disagreed with the communist "witch hunt" but chose to keep their heads down and go along with it to avoid their own persecution. He writes, "But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly." This sort of behavior is one of the biggest contributors to the panic that grows throughout The Crucible . For example, John Proctor hesitates to expose Abigail as a fraud because he fears repercussions from the court, and Parris is eager to turn on others to preserve his reputation.

In another relevant quote, Miller writes, "The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation ; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires." In The Crucible , Miller translates this concept into the Satanic plot that the officials believe is at work in Salem. Danforth claims that there is "a moving plot to topple Christ in the country!" (pg. 91). Danforth also insists that "a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between" (pg. 87). Nuance cannot be tolerated because the people in charge feel that the stakes are too high. Communist infiltration of the US government and the Devil’s infiltration of Salem are both disastrous scenarios that must be prevented at all costs, even if it means throwing innocent people under the bus.

Some people (including his former friend Elia Kazan) predictably complained that Miller’s analogy between the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism was bogus. After all, communists are real, and witches aren’t. Miller, however, says he viewed the analogy as perfectly sound. He argues that, in the 17th century, "the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America" because the Bible spoke of their existence. Witches were just as real to people in the 1690s as communists were to people in the 1950s.

He adds, "The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding ages of common experiences in the fifties : the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal." Miller was fascinated by what happened in Salem because of the parallels he could draw to the events of his life amidst the Red Scare. The Crucible has resonated across time because it expresses central truths about human nature. People will go to great lengths to avoid being ostracized by society, including, in many cases, betraying their true beliefs and selling out their friends.

Why Does the Relationship Between McCarthyism and The Crucible Matter?

Miller closes his essay by saying, "I am not sure what The Crucible is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties." Though we like to think of ourselves more enlightened than the people who conducted the Salem witch trials, virtually the same course of events has occurred many times in more recent history. The fear of witches only seems archaic because most of society no longer holds serious beliefs in the supernatural. Today, scenarios like this can be even more insidious because "witch hunts" are conducted for types of people that really do exist. There were, of course, communists in the US in the 1950s, but the vast majority of them had no designs on overthrowing the US government or becoming Soviet spies. The danger lies in assuming that purely because someone holds a political or religious belief, he or she must pose a threat.

People who are viewed as "other" continue to be persecuted out of fear and ignorance. The Crucible and McCarthyism can be compared to other modern forms of rumor, persecution, suspicion, and hysteria such as:

• The AIDS scare in the 80’s and 90’s
• Fear of terrorism in the past 15 or 20 years and how that’s affected US views and policies
• The Obama "birther" movement
• The many rumors perpetuated by gullible people on social media

Afterword: Discussion Questions

Now that you've read the article, you can try your hand at answering some of these discussion questions. I've included a few different types of questions on this topic that you might encounter in your English class:

• Discuss how Miller’s point of view influences the reading of the play. How did his own experiences shape his writing?
• Where does "fear" come from? Why, as a nation, do we fear others? Why, as individuals, do we fear others?
• Describe the political climate of the 1950s. Why did Senator McCarthy become a powerful figure? How did he influence politics in the fifties?
• As a socially conscious writer, Miller intended this play as a comment on McCarthyism. What are the parallels between the incidents Miller dramatizes and the acts of Senator McCarthy in the 1950s?
• Compare the events of the play to other historical or current events where innocent people are used as scapegoats. Is this a timeless cautionary tale?

What's Next?

Check out our full book summary of The Crucible so you can see for yourself how the play fits into its historical context.

Need some quotes to fill out your essay for English class? Read this article for a list of all the most important quotes in the play , categorized by theme.

To fully understand the messages of The Crucible , you need to get to know the main characters. We've written detailed character analyses for Abigail Williams , Rebecca Nurse , Mary Warren, John Proctor, and Giles Corey.

Interested in what witchcraft and magic in America looked like in the years leading up to the publication of The Crucible ? Learn who Aleister Crowley was and what influence he had on counter-culture with this article .

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Affect of McCarthyism on Society Essay

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Introduction

Definition of mccarthyism, description of mccarthyism, negative effects of mccarthyism on the lives of americans, mccarthyism’s effect on the political thinking of americans.

The term McCarthyism was derived from Joseph McCarthy a former US senator who was a Republican of Wisconsin. According to American history, McCarthyism is regarded as the period from 1950 to 1954. During this era, the United States of America was involved in a lot of anti-communism. At this period, the American government considered the American communist party rebellious. The American leadership together with its citizens were assumed either as suspects of communists or communist sympathizers (Keach, 2000, para 6).

Thus, this was an era that involved many accusations that were not supported by any evidence. Therefore McCarthyism is a term used to refer to the false allegation of one political faction, on the basis of their political stand. It was a period that existed in America from 1950 to 1954 which affected the majority of Americans negatively. It intimidated the Americans who were pro-communism and resulted to be discriminated against in employment opportunities. This affected their social life negatively. Thus, McCarthyism is not appropriate and hence should not be exercised not only in America but in any state.

McCarthyism is defined as a practice of accusing people of disloyalty and especially during pro-communist activity (Keach, 2000, para 6). These accusations are not supported by relevant evidence. Alternatively, McCarthyism can also be referred to as any effort that tries to hinder political criticism or curtail a certain group to express its views on certain issues happening in the government.

McCarthyism started in the 1940s and ended in 1950. ‘Witch-hunt’ was the term used to refer to McCarthyism. This meant acts of making accusations that were baseless. This period was referred to as the Second Red Scare because it was the period Americans feared communism. Joseph McCarthy used this period to intimidate people for his personal gain. Nowadays, McCarthyism is still in existence and is used to describe the practice of making false allegations to people without adequate proof of such an existence (Keach, 2000, para 8).

The lives of many Americans were negatively affected by McCarthyism. Majority of Americans who were considered pro-communism lost their lives, while others suffered by losing their jobs. In addition, this period ruined the good perception people had about America. This period was regarded as evil due to the fear it was associated with it (Keach, 2000, para 8). Therefore, anybody that practiced it was excluded from opportunities such as jobs.

Many American citizens who were accused suffered greatly as the majority lost their jobs. Thus, it greatly affected the social lives of many Americans negatively. This is because, despite the worldwide belief in American brotherhood, McCarthy had divided the Americans into two factions; the communists and the pro-communists. During recruitment, employers asked the interviewees questions which they were aimed at disclosing which group they supported to affirm whether they will be granted the jobs. The answers were supposed to be according to the Waldorf statement which stated that no known communist would be fired and therefore the pro-communists were fired.

Americans feared communalism and the accusations of McCarthy which had no relevant evidence made people not support communism. This is because instead of the government protecting its people by maintaining justice, it accused them falsely. Thus, people had negative attitudes towards politics (Keach, 2000, para 5).

According to the effects that McCarthyism had on the lives of the Americans such as people losing their lives, increased unemployment, and giving America a bad image national wide, then McCarthyism was and not appropriate. For example, during interviews, the firm asked employees questions on politics or other related areas in order to determine their political stand. How they answered these questions enabled the team to determine their stand which resulted in the pro-communists losing the opportunities to be employed, while the communists were employed. Therefore, there was no discrimination among employees.

McCarthyism is not appropriate in any society. It has many negative effects on people and the politics of the country. Therefore, McCarthyism should not be applied because it does not support justice and many innocent people suffer.

Keach, W. (2000). Rehabilitating McCarthyism. International Socialist .

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