{"id":1602,"date":"2015-08-20T05:35:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T05:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/americanyawphist118x15x1\/?post_type=chapter&p=1602"},"modified":"2015-08-20T05:35:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T05:35:00","slug":"the-cold-war-red-scare-mccarthyism-and-liberal-anti-communism-2","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/sanjacinto-atdcoursereview-ushistory2-1\/chapter\/the-cold-war-red-scare-mccarthyism-and-liberal-anti-communism-2\/","title":{"raw":"The Cold War Red Scare, McCarthyism, and Liberal Anti-Communism","rendered":"The Cold War Red Scare, McCarthyism, and Liberal Anti-Communism"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_915\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1000\"]\"Joseph<\/a> Joseph McCarthy, Republican Senator from Wisconsin, fueled fears during the early 1950s that communism was rampant and growing. This intensified Cold War tensions felt by every segment of society, from government officials to ordinary American citizens. Photograph of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, March 14, 1950. National Archives and Records Administration<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nJoseph McCarthy burst onto the national scene during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950. Waving a sheet of paper in the air, he proclaimed: \u201cI have here in my hand a list of 205\u2026names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping [US] policy.\u201d Since the Wisconsin Republican had no actual list, when pressed, the number changed to fifty-seven, then, later, eighty-one. Finally he promised to disclose the name of just one communist, the nation\u2019s \u201ctop Soviet agent.\u201d The shifting numbers brought ridicule, but it didn\u2019t matter, not really: McCarthy\u2019s claims won him fame and fueled the ongoing \u201cred scare.\u201d\r\n\r\nWithin a ten-month span beginning in 1949, the USSR developed a nuclear bomb, China fell to Communism, and over 300,000 American soldiers were deployed to fight land war in Korea. Newspapers, meanwhile, were filled with headlines alleging Soviet espionage.\r\n
[caption id=\"attachment_914\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"500\"]\"Julius<\/a> The environment of fear and panic instigated by McCarthyism led to the arrest of many innocent people. Still, some Americans accused of supplying top-secret information to the Soviets were in fact spies. The Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage and executed in 1953 for giving information about the atomic bomb to the Soviets. This was one case that has proven the test of time, for as recently as 2008 a co-conspirator of the Rosenbergs admitted to spying for the Soviet Union. Roger Higgins, \u201c[Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, separated by heavy wire screen as they leave U.S. Court House after being found guilty by jury],\u201d 1951. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]<\/div>\r\nDuring the war, Julius Rosenberg had worked briefly at the US Army Signal Corps Laboratory in New Jersey, where he had access to classified information. He and his wife Ethel, who had both been members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) in the 1930s, were accused of passing secret bomb-related documents into the hands of Soviet officials. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were indicted in August 1950 on changes of giving \u2018nuclear secrets\u2019 to the Russians. After a trial in March 1951, the Rosenbergs were found guilty and executed on June 19, 1953.The Rosenbergs offered anti-communists such as McCarthy the evidence they needed to allege a vast Soviet conspiracy to infiltrate and subvert the US government, allegations that justified the smearing all left-liberals, even those resolutely anti-communist. In the run-up to the 1950 and 1952 elections, progressives saw this not as a legitimate effort to expose actual subversive activity, but rather a campaign to tarnish the reputations of \u2018New Dealers\u2019 in the Democratic Party.Alger Hiss was another prize for conservatives, who identified him as the highest-ranking government official linked to Soviet espionage. While working for the State Department\u2019s Office of Far Eastern Affairs, Hiss had been a prominent member of the US delegation to Yalta before serving as secretary-general of the UN Charter Conference in San Francisco, from April-June 1945. He left the State Department in 1946. Hounded by a young congressman named Richard Nixon, public accusations finally won results. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers gave testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) claiming that he and Hiss had worked together as part of the secret \u2018communist underground\u2019 in Washington DC during the 1930s. Hiss, who always maintained his innocence, stood trial twice. Following a \u2018hung jury\u2019 decision in July 1949, he was finally convicted on two counts of perjury, the statute of limitations for espionage having expired.Although later evidence certainly suggested their guilt, the prominent convictions of a few suspected spies fueled a frenzy by many who saw communists everywhere. Not long after his February 1950 speech in Wheeling, Joe McCarthy\u2019s sensational charges became a source of growing controversy. Forced to respond, President Truman arranged a partisan congressional investigation designed to discredit McCarthy. The Tydings Committee held hearings from early March through July, 1950, then issued a final report admonishing McCarthy for perpetrating a \u201cfraud and a hoax\u201d on the American public.American progressives saw McCarthy\u2019s crusade as nothing less than a political witch hunt. In June 1950, The Nation<\/i> magazine editor Freda Kirchwey characterized \u201cMcCarthyism\u201d as \u201cthe means by which a handful of men, disguised as hunters of subversion, cynically subvert the instruments of justice\u2026in order to help their own political fortunes.\u201d \u00a0Truman\u2019s liberal supporters and leftists like Kirchwey hoped that McCarthy and the new \u2018ism\u2019 that bore his name would blow over quickly. Yet \u2018McCarthyism\u2019 was ultimately just a symptom of the widespread anti-communist hysteria that engulfed American society during the first Cold War.Faced with a growing awareness of Soviet espionage, and a tough election on the horizon, in March 1947 Truman gave in to pressure and issued Executive Order 9835, establishing loyalty reviews for federal employees. In the case of Foreign Service officers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was empowered to conduct closer examinations of all potential \u2018security risks\u2019; congressional committees, namely the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (SPSI), were authorized to gather facts and hold hearings. Following Truman\u2019s \u201cloyalty order,\u201d anti-subversion committees emerged in over a dozen state legislatures, while review procedures proliferated in public schools and universities across the country. At the University of California, for example, thirty-one professors were dismissed in 1950 after refusing to sign a loyalty oath. The Senate Internal Security (McCarran) Act passed in September 1950 mandated all \u201ccommunist organizations\u201d to register with the government and created a Senate investigative subcommittee equivalent to HUAC. The McCarran Act gave the government greater powers to investigate sedition and made it possible to prevent suspected individuals from gaining or keeping their citizenship. Between 1949 and 1954, HUAC, SPSI, and a new McCarran Committee conducted over one hundred distinct investigations of subversive activities.\r\n\r\nThere had been an American communist presence. The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) formed in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks created a Communist International (the Comintern) and invited socialists from around the world to join as they raised the red banner of revolution atop the palace in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg). During its first two years of existence, the CPUSA functioned in secret, hidden from a surge of anti-radical and anti-immigrant hysteria, investigations, deportations, and raids at the end of World War I. The CPUSA began its public life in 1921, after the panic subsided. Communism remained on the margins of American life until the 1930s, when leftists and liberals began to see the Soviet Union as a symbol of hope amid the Great Depression.\r\n\r\nDuring the 1930s, many communists joined the \u201cPopular Front,\u201d an effort to adapt communism to the United States and make it mainstream. During the Popular Front era communists were integrated into mainstream political institutions through alliances with progressives in the Democratic Party. The CPUSA enjoyed most of its influence and popularity among workers in unions linked to the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Communists also became strong opponents of southern \u2018Jim Crow\u2019 segregation and developed a presence in both the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The CPUSA, moreover, established \u201cfront\u201d groups such as the League of American Writers, in which intellectuals participated without direct knowledge of its ties to the Comintern. But even at the height of the global economic crisis, communism never attracted many Americans. Even at the peak of its membership, in 1944, the CPUSA had just 80,000 national \u201ccard-carrying\u201d members. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, \u201cthe Party\u201d exercised most of its power indirectly, through coalitions with liberals and reformers. But in the late 1930s, particularly when news broke of Hitler and Stalin\u2019s non-aggression pact of 1939, many fled the Party, a bloc of left-liberal anti-communists purged remaining communists in their ranks, and the Popular Front collapsed.\r\n\r\nLacking the legal grounds to abolish the CPUSA, officials instead sought to expose and contain CPUSA influence. Following a series of predecessor committees, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was established in 1938, then reorganized after the war and given the explicit task of investigating communism. By the time the Communist Control Act was passed in August 1954, effectively criminalizing Party membership, the CPUSA had long ceased to have meaningful influence.\r\n\r\nAnti-communists were driven to eliminate remaining CPUSA influence from progressive institutions, including the NAACP and the CIO. The Taft-Hartley Act (1947) gave union officials the initiative to purge communists from the labor movement. A kind of \u201cCold War\u201d liberalism took hold. In January 1947, anti-communist liberals formed Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), whose founding members included labor leader Walter Reuther and NAACP chairman Walter White, as well as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Working to help Truman defeat former vice-president Henry Wallace\u2019s popular front-backed campaign in 1948, the ADA combined social and economic reforms with staunch anti-communism.\r\n\r\nThe domestic Cold War was bipartisan, fueled by a consensus drawn from a left-liberal and conservative anti-communist alliance that included politicians and policymakers, journalists and scientists, business and civic\/religious leaders, and educators and entertainers.\r\n\r\nLed by its imperious director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI took an active role in the domestic battle against communism. Hoover\u2019s FBI helped incite panic by assisting the creation of blatantly propagandistic films and television shows, including The Red Menace<\/i> (1949), My Son John, <\/i>(1951), and I Led Three Lives<\/i> (1953-1956). Such alarmist depictions of espionage and treason in a \u2018free world\u2019 imperiled by communism heightened a culture of fear experienced in the 1950s. In the fall of 1947, HUAC entered the fray with highly publicized hearings of Hollywood. Film mogul Walt Disney and actor Ronald Reagan, among others, testified to aid investigators\u2019 attempts to expose communist influence in the entertainment industry. A group of writers, directors, and producers who refused to answer questions were held in contempt of Congress. This \u2018Hollywood Ten\u2019 created the precedent for a \u2018blacklist\u2019 in which hundreds of film artists were barred from industry work for the next decade.\r\n\r\nHUAC made repeated visits to Hollywood during the 1950s, and their interrogation of celebrities often began with the same intimidating refrain: \u201cAre you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?\u201d Many witnesses cooperated, and \u201cnamed names,\u201d naming anyone they knew who had ever been associated with communist-related groups or organizations. In 1956, black entertainer and activist Paul Robeson chided his HUAC inquisitors, claiming that they had put him on trial not for his politics, but because he had spent his life \u201cfighting for the rights\u201d of his people. \u201cYou are the un-Americans,\u201d he told them, \u201cand you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.\u201d As Robeson and other victims of McCarthyism learned first-hand, this \u201csecond red scare,\u201d in the glow of nuclear annihilation and global \u201ctotalitarianism,\u201d fueled an intolerant and skeptical political world, what Cold War liberal Arthur Schlesinger, in his The Vital Center <\/i>(1949), called an \u201cage of anxiety.\u201d\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_922\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1000\"]\"Paul<\/a> Many accused of Communist sentiments vehemently denied such allegations, including the one of the most well-known Americans at the time, African American actor and signer Paul Robeson. Unwilling to sign an affidavit confirming he was Communist, his U.S. passport was revoked. During the Cold War, he was condemned by the American press and neither his music nor films could be purchased in the U.S. Photograph<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nAnti-communist ideology valorized overt patriotism, religious conviction, and faith in capitalism. Those who shunned such \u201cAmerican values\u201d were open to attack. If communism was a plague spreading across Europe and Asia, anti-communist hyperbole infected cities, towns, and suburbs throughout the country. The playwright Arthur Miller, <\/i>whose popular 1953 The Crucible <\/i>compared the red scare to the Salem Witch Trials, wrote,<\/i>\u201cIn America any man who is not reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell. Political opposition, thereby, is given an inhumane overlay which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized intercourse. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence. Once such an equation is effectively made, society becomes a congerie of plots and counterplots, and the main role of government changes from that of the arbiter to that of the scourge of God.\u201d\r\n\r\nRallying against communism, American society urged conformity. \u201cDeviant\u201d behavior became dangerous. Having entered the workforce en masse<\/i>as part of a collective effort in World War II, middle class women were told to return to house-making responsibilities. Having fought and died abroad to for American democracy, blacks were told to return home and acquiesce to the American racial order. Homosexuality, already stigmatized, became dangerous. Personal secrets were seen as a liability that exposed one to blackmail. The same paranoid mindset that fueled the second red scare also ignited the Cold War \u201clavender scare.\u201d\r\n\r\nAmerican religion, meanwhile, was fixated on what McCarthy, in his 1950 Wheeling speech, called an \u201call-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.\u201d Cold warriors in the US routinely referred to a fundamental incompatibility between \u201cgodless communism\u201d and god-fearing<\/i>Americanism. Religious conservatives championed the idea of traditional nuclear god-fearing family as a bulwark against the spread of atheistic totalitarianism. As Baptist minister Billy Graham sermonized in 1950, communism aimed to \u201cdestroy the American home and cause \u2026 moral deterioration,\u201d leaving the country exposed to communist infiltration.\r\n\r\nIn an atmosphere in which ideas of national belonging and citizenship were so closely linked to religious commitment, Americans during the early Cold War years attended church, professed a belief in a supreme being, and stressed the importance of religion in their lives at higher rates than in any time in American history. Americans sought to differentiate themselves from godless communists through public displays of religiosity. Politicians infused government with religious symbols. The Pledge of Allegiance was altered to include the words \u201cone nation, under God\u201d in 1954. \u201cIn God We Trust\u201d was adopted as the official national motto in 1956. In popular culture, one of the most popular films of the decade, The Ten Commandments <\/i>(1956), retold the biblical Exodus story as a Cold War parable, echoing (incidentally) NSC 68\u2019s characterization of the Soviet Union as a \u201cslave state.\u201d Monuments of the Ten Commandments went to court houses and city halls across the country.\r\n\r\nWhile the link between American nationalism and religion grew much closer during the Cold War, many Americans began to believe that just believing in almost any religion was better than being an atheist. Gone was the overt anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic language of Protestants in the past. Now, leaders spoke of a common \u201cJudeo-Christian\u201d heritage. In December 1952, a month before his inauguration, Dwight Eisenhower said that \u201cour form of government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply-felt religious faith, and I don\u2019t care what it is.\u201d\r\n\r\nJoseph McCarthy, an Irish Catholic, made common cause with prominent religious anti-communists, including southern evangelist Billy James Hargis of Christian Crusade<\/i>, a popular radio and television ministry that peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. Cold War religion in America also crossed the political divide. During the 1952 campaign, Eisenhower spoke of US foreign policy as \u201ca war of light against darkness, freedom against slavery, Godliness against atheism.\u201d His Democratic opponent, former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson said that America was engaged in a battle with the \u201cAnti-Christ.\u201d While Billy Graham became a spiritual adviser to Eisenhower as well as other Republican and Democratic presidents, the same was true of the liberal Protestant Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the nation\u2019s most important theologian when he appeared on the cover of Life<\/i> in March 1948.\r\n\r\nThough publicly rebuked by the Tydings Committee, McCarthy soldiered on. In June 1951, on the floor of Congress, McCarthy charged that then-Secretary of Defense (and former secretary of state) Gen. George Marshall had fallen prey to \u201ca conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.\u201d He claimed that Marshall, a war hero, had helped to \u201cdiminish the United States in world affairs,\u201d enable the US to \u201cfinally fall victim to Soviet intrigue\u2026 and Russian military might.\u201d The speech caused an uproar. During the 1952 campaign, Eisenhower, who was in all things moderate and politically cautious, refused to publicly denounce McCarthy. \u201cI will not\u2026get into the gutter with that guy,\u201d he wrote privately. McCarthy campaigned for Eisenhower, who won a stunning victory.\r\n\r\nSo did the Republicans, who regained Congress. McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (SPSI). He targeted many, and turned his newfound power against the government\u2019s overseas broadcast division, the Voice of America (VOA). McCarthy\u2019s investigation in February-March 1953 resulted in several resignations or transfers. McCarthy\u2019s mudslinging had become increasingly unrestrained. Soon he went after the U.S. Army. After forcing the Army to again disprove theories of a Soviet spy ring at Ft. Monmouth in New Jersey, McCarthy publicly berated officers suspected of promoting leftists. McCarthy\u2019s badgering of witnesses created cover for critics to publicly denounce his abrasive fear-mongering.\r\n\r\nOn March 9, CBS anchor Edward Murrow, a cold war liberal, told his television audience that McCarthy\u2019s actions had \u201ccaused alarm and dismay amongst \u2026 allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies.\u201d Yet, Murrow explained, \u201cHe didn\u2019t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it\u2014and rather successfully. Cassius was right. \u2018The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our\u00a0stars, but in ourselves.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\nTwenty million people saw the \u201cArmy-McCarthy Hearings\u201d unfold over thirty-six days in 1954. The Army\u2019s head counsel, Joseph Welch, captured much of the mood of the country when he defended a fellow lawyer from McCarthy\u2019s public smears, saying, \u201cLet us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You\u2019ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?\u201d In September, a senate subcommittee recommended that McCarthy be censured. On December 2, 1954, his colleagues voted 67-22 to \u201ccondemn\u201d his actions. Humiliated, McCarthy faded into irrelevance and alcoholism and died in May 1957, at age 48.\r\n\r\nBy the late 1950s, the worst of the second red scare was over. Stalin\u2019s death, followed by the Korean War armistice, opened new space\u2014and hope\u2014for the easing of Cold War tensions. D\u00e9tente and the upheavals of the late 1960s were on the horizon. But McCarthyism outlasted McCarthy and the 1950s. McCarthy made an almost unparalleled impact on Cold War American society. The tactics he perfected continued to be practiced long after his death. \u201cRed-baiting,\u201d the act of smearing a political opponent by linking them to communism or some other demonized ideology, persevered. McCarthy had hardly alone.\r\n\r\nCongressman Richard Nixon, for instance, used his place on HUAC and his public role in the campaign against Alger Hiss to catapult himself into the White House alongside Eisenhower and later into the presidency. Ronald Reagan bolstered the fame he had won in Hollywood with his testimony before Congress and his anti-communist work for major American corporations such as General Electric. He too would use anti-communism to enter public life and chart a course to the presidency. In 1958, radical anti-communists founded the John Birch Society, attacking liberals and civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. as communists. Although joined by Cold War liberals, the weight of anti-communism was used as part of an assault against the New Deal and its defenders. Even those liberals, such as historian Arthur Schlesinger, who had fought against communism found themselves smeared by the red scare. Politics and culture both had been reshaped. The leftist American tradition was in tatters, destroyed by anti-communist hysteria. Movements for social justice, from civil rights to gay rights to feminism, were all suppressed under Cold War conformity.","rendered":"
\n
\"Joseph<\/a><\/p>\n

Joseph McCarthy, Republican Senator from Wisconsin, fueled fears during the early 1950s that communism was rampant and growing. This intensified Cold War tensions felt by every segment of society, from government officials to ordinary American citizens. Photograph of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, March 14, 1950. National Archives and Records Administration<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Joseph McCarthy burst onto the national scene during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950. Waving a sheet of paper in the air, he proclaimed: \u201cI have here in my hand a list of 205\u2026names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping [US] policy.\u201d Since the Wisconsin Republican had no actual list, when pressed, the number changed to fifty-seven, then, later, eighty-one. Finally he promised to disclose the name of just one communist, the nation\u2019s \u201ctop Soviet agent.\u201d The shifting numbers brought ridicule, but it didn\u2019t matter, not really: McCarthy\u2019s claims won him fame and fueled the ongoing \u201cred scare.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within a ten-month span beginning in 1949, the USSR developed a nuclear bomb, China fell to Communism, and over 300,000 American soldiers were deployed to fight land war in Korea. Newspapers, meanwhile, were filled with headlines alleging Soviet espionage.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Julius<\/a><\/p>\n

The environment of fear and panic instigated by McCarthyism led to the arrest of many innocent people. Still, some Americans accused of supplying top-secret information to the Soviets were in fact spies. The Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage and executed in 1953 for giving information about the atomic bomb to the Soviets. This was one case that has proven the test of time, for as recently as 2008 a co-conspirator of the Rosenbergs admitted to spying for the Soviet Union. Roger Higgins, \u201c[Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, separated by heavy wire screen as they leave U.S. Court House after being found guilty by jury],\u201d 1951. Library of Congress<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

During the war, Julius Rosenberg had worked briefly at the US Army Signal Corps Laboratory in New Jersey, where he had access to classified information. He and his wife Ethel, who had both been members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) in the 1930s, were accused of passing secret bomb-related documents into the hands of Soviet officials. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were indicted in August 1950 on changes of giving \u2018nuclear secrets\u2019 to the Russians. After a trial in March 1951, the Rosenbergs were found guilty and executed on June 19, 1953.The Rosenbergs offered anti-communists such as McCarthy the evidence they needed to allege a vast Soviet conspiracy to infiltrate and subvert the US government, allegations that justified the smearing all left-liberals, even those resolutely anti-communist. In the run-up to the 1950 and 1952 elections, progressives saw this not as a legitimate effort to expose actual subversive activity, but rather a campaign to tarnish the reputations of \u2018New Dealers\u2019 in the Democratic Party.Alger Hiss was another prize for conservatives, who identified him as the highest-ranking government official linked to Soviet espionage. While working for the State Department\u2019s Office of Far Eastern Affairs, Hiss had been a prominent member of the US delegation to Yalta before serving as secretary-general of the UN Charter Conference in San Francisco, from April-June 1945. He left the State Department in 1946. Hounded by a young congressman named Richard Nixon, public accusations finally won results. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers gave testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) claiming that he and Hiss had worked together as part of the secret \u2018communist underground\u2019 in Washington DC during the 1930s. Hiss, who always maintained his innocence, stood trial twice. Following a \u2018hung jury\u2019 decision in July 1949, he was finally convicted on two counts of perjury, the statute of limitations for espionage having expired.Although later evidence certainly suggested their guilt, the prominent convictions of a few suspected spies fueled a frenzy by many who saw communists everywhere. Not long after his February 1950 speech in Wheeling, Joe McCarthy\u2019s sensational charges became a source of growing controversy. Forced to respond, President Truman arranged a partisan congressional investigation designed to discredit McCarthy. The Tydings Committee held hearings from early March through July, 1950, then issued a final report admonishing McCarthy for perpetrating a \u201cfraud and a hoax\u201d on the American public.American progressives saw McCarthy\u2019s crusade as nothing less than a political witch hunt. In June 1950, The Nation<\/i> magazine editor Freda Kirchwey characterized \u201cMcCarthyism\u201d as \u201cthe means by which a handful of men, disguised as hunters of subversion, cynically subvert the instruments of justice\u2026in order to help their own political fortunes.\u201d \u00a0Truman\u2019s liberal supporters and leftists like Kirchwey hoped that McCarthy and the new \u2018ism\u2019 that bore his name would blow over quickly. Yet \u2018McCarthyism\u2019 was ultimately just a symptom of the widespread anti-communist hysteria that engulfed American society during the first Cold War.Faced with a growing awareness of Soviet espionage, and a tough election on the horizon, in March 1947 Truman gave in to pressure and issued Executive Order 9835, establishing loyalty reviews for federal employees. In the case of Foreign Service officers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was empowered to conduct closer examinations of all potential \u2018security risks\u2019; congressional committees, namely the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (SPSI), were authorized to gather facts and hold hearings. Following Truman\u2019s \u201cloyalty order,\u201d anti-subversion committees emerged in over a dozen state legislatures, while review procedures proliferated in public schools and universities across the country. At the University of California, for example, thirty-one professors were dismissed in 1950 after refusing to sign a loyalty oath. The Senate Internal Security (McCarran) Act passed in September 1950 mandated all \u201ccommunist organizations\u201d to register with the government and created a Senate investigative subcommittee equivalent to HUAC. The McCarran Act gave the government greater powers to investigate sedition and made it possible to prevent suspected individuals from gaining or keeping their citizenship. Between 1949 and 1954, HUAC, SPSI, and a new McCarran Committee conducted over one hundred distinct investigations of subversive activities.<\/p>\n

There had been an American communist presence. The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) formed in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks created a Communist International (the Comintern) and invited socialists from around the world to join as they raised the red banner of revolution atop the palace in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg). During its first two years of existence, the CPUSA functioned in secret, hidden from a surge of anti-radical and anti-immigrant hysteria, investigations, deportations, and raids at the end of World War I. The CPUSA began its public life in 1921, after the panic subsided. Communism remained on the margins of American life until the 1930s, when leftists and liberals began to see the Soviet Union as a symbol of hope amid the Great Depression.<\/p>\n

During the 1930s, many communists joined the \u201cPopular Front,\u201d an effort to adapt communism to the United States and make it mainstream. During the Popular Front era communists were integrated into mainstream political institutions through alliances with progressives in the Democratic Party. The CPUSA enjoyed most of its influence and popularity among workers in unions linked to the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Communists also became strong opponents of southern \u2018Jim Crow\u2019 segregation and developed a presence in both the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The CPUSA, moreover, established \u201cfront\u201d groups such as the League of American Writers, in which intellectuals participated without direct knowledge of its ties to the Comintern. But even at the height of the global economic crisis, communism never attracted many Americans. Even at the peak of its membership, in 1944, the CPUSA had just 80,000 national \u201ccard-carrying\u201d members. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, \u201cthe Party\u201d exercised most of its power indirectly, through coalitions with liberals and reformers. But in the late 1930s, particularly when news broke of Hitler and Stalin\u2019s non-aggression pact of 1939, many fled the Party, a bloc of left-liberal anti-communists purged remaining communists in their ranks, and the Popular Front collapsed.<\/p>\n

Lacking the legal grounds to abolish the CPUSA, officials instead sought to expose and contain CPUSA influence. Following a series of predecessor committees, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was established in 1938, then reorganized after the war and given the explicit task of investigating communism. By the time the Communist Control Act was passed in August 1954, effectively criminalizing Party membership, the CPUSA had long ceased to have meaningful influence.<\/p>\n

Anti-communists were driven to eliminate remaining CPUSA influence from progressive institutions, including the NAACP and the CIO. The Taft-Hartley Act (1947) gave union officials the initiative to purge communists from the labor movement. A kind of \u201cCold War\u201d liberalism took hold. In January 1947, anti-communist liberals formed Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), whose founding members included labor leader Walter Reuther and NAACP chairman Walter White, as well as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Working to help Truman defeat former vice-president Henry Wallace\u2019s popular front-backed campaign in 1948, the ADA combined social and economic reforms with staunch anti-communism.<\/p>\n

The domestic Cold War was bipartisan, fueled by a consensus drawn from a left-liberal and conservative anti-communist alliance that included politicians and policymakers, journalists and scientists, business and civic\/religious leaders, and educators and entertainers.<\/p>\n

Led by its imperious director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI took an active role in the domestic battle against communism. Hoover\u2019s FBI helped incite panic by assisting the creation of blatantly propagandistic films and television shows, including The Red Menace<\/i> (1949), My Son John, <\/i>(1951), and I Led Three Lives<\/i> (1953-1956). Such alarmist depictions of espionage and treason in a \u2018free world\u2019 imperiled by communism heightened a culture of fear experienced in the 1950s. In the fall of 1947, HUAC entered the fray with highly publicized hearings of Hollywood. Film mogul Walt Disney and actor Ronald Reagan, among others, testified to aid investigators\u2019 attempts to expose communist influence in the entertainment industry. A group of writers, directors, and producers who refused to answer questions were held in contempt of Congress. This \u2018Hollywood Ten\u2019 created the precedent for a \u2018blacklist\u2019 in which hundreds of film artists were barred from industry work for the next decade.<\/p>\n

HUAC made repeated visits to Hollywood during the 1950s, and their interrogation of celebrities often began with the same intimidating refrain: \u201cAre you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?\u201d Many witnesses cooperated, and \u201cnamed names,\u201d naming anyone they knew who had ever been associated with communist-related groups or organizations. In 1956, black entertainer and activist Paul Robeson chided his HUAC inquisitors, claiming that they had put him on trial not for his politics, but because he had spent his life \u201cfighting for the rights\u201d of his people. \u201cYou are the un-Americans,\u201d he told them, \u201cand you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.\u201d As Robeson and other victims of McCarthyism learned first-hand, this \u201csecond red scare,\u201d in the glow of nuclear annihilation and global \u201ctotalitarianism,\u201d fueled an intolerant and skeptical political world, what Cold War liberal Arthur Schlesinger, in his The Vital Center <\/i>(1949), called an \u201cage of anxiety.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Paul<\/a><\/p>\n

Many accused of Communist sentiments vehemently denied such allegations, including the one of the most well-known Americans at the time, African American actor and signer Paul Robeson. Unwilling to sign an affidavit confirming he was Communist, his U.S. passport was revoked. During the Cold War, he was condemned by the American press and neither his music nor films could be purchased in the U.S. Photograph<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Anti-communist ideology valorized overt patriotism, religious conviction, and faith in capitalism. Those who shunned such \u201cAmerican values\u201d were open to attack. If communism was a plague spreading across Europe and Asia, anti-communist hyperbole infected cities, towns, and suburbs throughout the country. The playwright Arthur Miller, <\/i>whose popular 1953 The Crucible <\/i>compared the red scare to the Salem Witch Trials, wrote,<\/i>\u201cIn America any man who is not reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell. Political opposition, thereby, is given an inhumane overlay which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized intercourse. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence. Once such an equation is effectively made, society becomes a congerie of plots and counterplots, and the main role of government changes from that of the arbiter to that of the scourge of God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rallying against communism, American society urged conformity. \u201cDeviant\u201d behavior became dangerous. Having entered the workforce en masse<\/i>as part of a collective effort in World War II, middle class women were told to return to house-making responsibilities. Having fought and died abroad to for American democracy, blacks were told to return home and acquiesce to the American racial order. Homosexuality, already stigmatized, became dangerous. Personal secrets were seen as a liability that exposed one to blackmail. The same paranoid mindset that fueled the second red scare also ignited the Cold War \u201clavender scare.\u201d<\/p>\n

American religion, meanwhile, was fixated on what McCarthy, in his 1950 Wheeling speech, called an \u201call-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.\u201d Cold warriors in the US routinely referred to a fundamental incompatibility between \u201cgodless communism\u201d and god-fearing<\/i>Americanism. Religious conservatives championed the idea of traditional nuclear god-fearing family as a bulwark against the spread of atheistic totalitarianism. As Baptist minister Billy Graham sermonized in 1950, communism aimed to \u201cdestroy the American home and cause \u2026 moral deterioration,\u201d leaving the country exposed to communist infiltration.<\/p>\n

In an atmosphere in which ideas of national belonging and citizenship were so closely linked to religious commitment, Americans during the early Cold War years attended church, professed a belief in a supreme being, and stressed the importance of religion in their lives at higher rates than in any time in American history. Americans sought to differentiate themselves from godless communists through public displays of religiosity. Politicians infused government with religious symbols. The Pledge of Allegiance was altered to include the words \u201cone nation, under God\u201d in 1954. \u201cIn God We Trust\u201d was adopted as the official national motto in 1956. In popular culture, one of the most popular films of the decade, The Ten Commandments <\/i>(1956), retold the biblical Exodus story as a Cold War parable, echoing (incidentally) NSC 68\u2019s characterization of the Soviet Union as a \u201cslave state.\u201d Monuments of the Ten Commandments went to court houses and city halls across the country.<\/p>\n

While the link between American nationalism and religion grew much closer during the Cold War, many Americans began to believe that just believing in almost any religion was better than being an atheist. Gone was the overt anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic language of Protestants in the past. Now, leaders spoke of a common \u201cJudeo-Christian\u201d heritage. In December 1952, a month before his inauguration, Dwight Eisenhower said that \u201cour form of government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply-felt religious faith, and I don\u2019t care what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joseph McCarthy, an Irish Catholic, made common cause with prominent religious anti-communists, including southern evangelist Billy James Hargis of Christian Crusade<\/i>, a popular radio and television ministry that peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. Cold War religion in America also crossed the political divide. During the 1952 campaign, Eisenhower spoke of US foreign policy as \u201ca war of light against darkness, freedom against slavery, Godliness against atheism.\u201d His Democratic opponent, former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson said that America was engaged in a battle with the \u201cAnti-Christ.\u201d While Billy Graham became a spiritual adviser to Eisenhower as well as other Republican and Democratic presidents, the same was true of the liberal Protestant Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the nation\u2019s most important theologian when he appeared on the cover of Life<\/i> in March 1948.<\/p>\n

Though publicly rebuked by the Tydings Committee, McCarthy soldiered on. In June 1951, on the floor of Congress, McCarthy charged that then-Secretary of Defense (and former secretary of state) Gen. George Marshall had fallen prey to \u201ca conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.\u201d He claimed that Marshall, a war hero, had helped to \u201cdiminish the United States in world affairs,\u201d enable the US to \u201cfinally fall victim to Soviet intrigue\u2026 and Russian military might.\u201d The speech caused an uproar. During the 1952 campaign, Eisenhower, who was in all things moderate and politically cautious, refused to publicly denounce McCarthy. \u201cI will not\u2026get into the gutter with that guy,\u201d he wrote privately. McCarthy campaigned for Eisenhower, who won a stunning victory.<\/p>\n

So did the Republicans, who regained Congress. McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (SPSI). He targeted many, and turned his newfound power against the government\u2019s overseas broadcast division, the Voice of America (VOA). McCarthy\u2019s investigation in February-March 1953 resulted in several resignations or transfers. McCarthy\u2019s mudslinging had become increasingly unrestrained. Soon he went after the U.S. Army. After forcing the Army to again disprove theories of a Soviet spy ring at Ft. Monmouth in New Jersey, McCarthy publicly berated officers suspected of promoting leftists. McCarthy\u2019s badgering of witnesses created cover for critics to publicly denounce his abrasive fear-mongering.<\/p>\n

On March 9, CBS anchor Edward Murrow, a cold war liberal, told his television audience that McCarthy\u2019s actions had \u201ccaused alarm and dismay amongst \u2026 allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies.\u201d Yet, Murrow explained, \u201cHe didn\u2019t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it\u2014and rather successfully. Cassius was right. \u2018The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our\u00a0stars, but in ourselves.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Twenty million people saw the \u201cArmy-McCarthy Hearings\u201d unfold over thirty-six days in 1954. The Army\u2019s head counsel, Joseph Welch, captured much of the mood of the country when he defended a fellow lawyer from McCarthy\u2019s public smears, saying, \u201cLet us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You\u2019ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?\u201d In September, a senate subcommittee recommended that McCarthy be censured. On December 2, 1954, his colleagues voted 67-22 to \u201ccondemn\u201d his actions. Humiliated, McCarthy faded into irrelevance and alcoholism and died in May 1957, at age 48.<\/p>\n

By the late 1950s, the worst of the second red scare was over. Stalin\u2019s death, followed by the Korean War armistice, opened new space\u2014and hope\u2014for the easing of Cold War tensions. D\u00e9tente and the upheavals of the late 1960s were on the horizon. But McCarthyism outlasted McCarthy and the 1950s. McCarthy made an almost unparalleled impact on Cold War American society. The tactics he perfected continued to be practiced long after his death. \u201cRed-baiting,\u201d the act of smearing a political opponent by linking them to communism or some other demonized ideology, persevered. McCarthy had hardly alone.<\/p>\n

Congressman Richard Nixon, for instance, used his place on HUAC and his public role in the campaign against Alger Hiss to catapult himself into the White House alongside Eisenhower and later into the presidency. Ronald Reagan bolstered the fame he had won in Hollywood with his testimony before Congress and his anti-communist work for major American corporations such as General Electric. He too would use anti-communism to enter public life and chart a course to the presidency. In 1958, radical anti-communists founded the John Birch Society, attacking liberals and civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. as communists. Although joined by Cold War liberals, the weight of anti-communism was used as part of an assault against the New Deal and its defenders. Even those liberals, such as historian Arthur Schlesinger, who had fought against communism found themselves smeared by the red scare. Politics and culture both had been reshaped. The leftist American tradition was in tatters, destroyed by anti-communist hysteria. Movements for social justice, from civil rights to gay rights to feminism, were all suppressed under Cold War conformity.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t

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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
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