McCarthyism

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McCarthyism

McCarthyism took place during a period of intense suspicion in the United States primarily from 1950 to 1954, when the U.S. government was actively countering alleged American Communist Party subversion, its leadership, and others suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. During this period people from all walks of life became the subject of aggressive witch-hunts, often based on inconclusive or questionable evidence. It grew out of the Second Red Scare that began in the late 1940s and is named after the U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin.

Background

In June of 1947, members of the Senate Appropriations Committee sent a confidential report to Secretary of State George Marshall, in which they stated:

It is evident that there is a deliberate calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places, but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity. . . . On file in the Department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States, which involves large numbers of State Department employees. . . this report has been challenged and ignored by those charged with the responsibility of administering the department...

Joseph McCarthy's involvement with the cultural phenomenon that would bear his name began on January 7th, 1950 when the Wisconsin senator asked friends he was dining with for advice on how to make himself known. They suggested taking an anti-communist stand. He began with a speech he made on Lincoln Day, February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of known communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is quoted as saying: "I have here in my hand a list of

57 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department." This speech resulted in a flood of press attention to McCarthy and set him on the path that would characterize the rest of his career and life.

Origin of the term

The term originates from a March 29, 1950 political cartoon by Washington Post editorial cartoonist Herbert Block. The cartoon depicted four leading Republicans trying to push an elephant (the traditional symbol of the Republican Party) to stand on a teetering stack of ten tar buckets, the topmost of which was labeled "McCarthyism."

Tensions of the times

The beginnings of the Cold War could have been with a dispute over Poland between the U.S. and U.S.S.R directly after WWII. In July 1946, after the Yalta Conference, the two sides could not agree to the form of the government of Poland. The Soviets were accused of wanting to set up a puppet régime in which they could control a buffer state on their western border. The Americans preferred free elections and a democratic government in Poland and other eastern European states.

Beginning 24 June 1948 the next major crisis of the Cold War exposed the rift in the Alliance of World War II which had defeated Germany, when Soviet troops blockaded access points to Berlin, sparking the first Berlin Crisis, and lasting a year.

In late summer of 1949, on 29 August the Soviet atomic bomb project was revealed when it exploded a replica of the atomic bomb Fat Man; the Soviet Union had gained some of its nuclear technology by espionage from the United States.

Later that fall, on 1 October Maoist forces were victorious after the effective subversion of President Roosevelt’s support for the Chinese Nationalist government during World War II.

On 21 January, 1950, Alger Hiss, the General Secretary of the United Nations Charter meeting, was convicted of perjury for testimony before HUAC regarding espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. That same month, physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed in Great Britain to espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the War.

On 25 June, the Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea, a confrontation that came with the potential for the use of nuclear weapons. Three weeks later, on 17 July, Julius Rosenberg was arrested on charges of espionage regarding the transfer of nuclear weapon technology to the Soviet Union while working at Fort Monmouth.

In May 1951, two members of the Cambridge Five — Donald MacLean, Second Secretary of the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., and Guy Burgess — defected to Moscow after it was discovered MacLean transmitted information on the atom bomb from the British Embassy to the Soviet Union during World War II.

In this atmosphere, McCarthyism flourished.

Alleged victims of McCarthyism

Persons who were alleged to have been victims of McCarthyism were either denied employment in the private sector or failed government security checks. In the film industry alone, over 300 actors, writers and directors were denied work in the U.S. through the informal Hollywood blacklist.

Some of those alleged to have been blacklisted were:

People called by the House Un-American Activities Committee

David Bohm, physicist
Charlie Chaplin, actor
John Garfield, actor
Lillian Hellman, playwright and left-wing activist
John Hubley, animator
Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist
J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist, "father of the atomic bomb"
Paul Robeson, actor, athlete, singer, writer, political and civil rights activist, and winner of Stalin Peace Prize
Waldo Salt, writer, government employee & CPUSA member.

People called by the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee

Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist

Others

Aaron Copland, composer of modern tonal music
Dashiell Hammett, author
Alfred Kinsey, founder of the Institute for Sex Research, author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
David Smith, theologian
Paul Sweezy, economist and founder-editor of Monthly Review
Tsien Hsue-shen, physicist

Reactions

McCarthy's influence faltered in 1954. On March 9, 1954, famed CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow aired a highly critical "Report on Joseph R. McCarthy" that used footage of McCarthy himself to portray him as dishonest in his speeches and abusive toward witnesses. In April of the same year the Army-McCarthy Hearings began and were televised live on the new American Broadcasting Company. This allowed the public and press to view first-hand McCarthy's interrogation of individuals and his controversial tactics. In one exchange, McCarthy reminded the Army's attorney general, Joseph Welch that he had an employee in his law firm who had belonged to an organization that had been accused of Communist sympathies. Welch famously rebuked McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" This exchange reflected a growing negative public opinion of McCarthy.

The criticisms of McCarthyism and McCarthy in particular were three-fold:

That he was ruining the reputations and lives of many people by accusing them without credible evidence.
That he used accusations of Communist sympathies as a counter attack against anyone who criticized his methods.
That he argued against freedom of speech; much of his rhetoric assumed that any discussion of the ideas of Communism was a dangerous and un-American activity.

Continuing controversy

The release of the VENONA transcripts and material from Eastern bloc intelligence archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, added more material for the discussion of what had been going on during the 1950s. The Soviet records show that the general contention that Communist spies had infiltrated the federal government was true. The American Communist Party (CPUSA) had senior members in the pay of the Soviet Union. Communist spies included Julius Rosenberg and Theodore Hall, who gave nuclear secrets to the Soviets, and Harry Dexter White, who was the founding head of the International Monetary Fund. Other data have shown that Western anti-communists grossly overestimated the actual capacity of the Soviets to do harm through military and economic means—long believing, for example, that Soviet nuclear missile technology was vastly superior to that of the U.S., and also grossly overestimating other measures of Soviet strength such as annual GNP.

Many Americans responded to the cruder manifestations of the Red Scare by dismissing all claims by anti-communists concerning presumed communist infiltration in the United States. Though many of the more outré accusations of the McCarthy period—such as the claim that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist—now seem laughable, the debate over the Red Scare remains a significant theme in the culture wars between left-liberal and conservative factions in American politics. The guilt, innocence, and good or bad intentions of the icons of the Red Scare (McCarthy, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, Elia Kazan) are still discussed as proxies for the imputed virtues or vices of their successors and sympathizers. See historical revisionism.

Though the interpretation of the Red Scare might seem to be of only historical interest following the end of the Cold War, the political divisions it created in the United States continue to manifest themselves, and the politics and history of anti-communism in the United States are still contentious. One source of controversy is that illegal actions taken against the radical left during the Palmer and McCarthy periods are viewed as providing a historical template for similar actions against Muslims following the September 11th terrorist attacks, an analogy made explicit both by left-wing opponents of such actions (such as the American Civil Liberties Union) and right-wing proponents (such as Ann Coulter).

Critiques

From the viewpoint of some conservatives and McCarthy supporters at the time, the identification of foreign agents and the suppression of "radical organizations" was necessary. Senator McCarthy and his followers felt there was a dangerous subversive element that posed a danger to the security of the country, thereby justifying extreme measures—the embodiment of realpolitik.

The Arthur Miller play The Crucible, written during the McCarthy era, used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the McCarthyism of the 1950s, suggesting that the process of McCarthyism-style persecution can occur at any time or place. For example, those accused in McCarthy or HUAC hearings had little chance of exonerating themselves once their identities were revealed to the public. Simply being accused of Communist sympathies was sufficient to damage or end many careers. Similarly, those accused in The Crucible could not even argue their innocence; doing so would be undermining the court, a heresy during those strict theocratic times.

Ann Coulter wrote extensively in her book Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism about Senator McCarthy, and offered a defense for many of his activities and those of HUAC. However, most historians studying McCarthyism rejected Coulter's analysis as using history to provide justifications for current efforts by neoconservatives to limit dissent in America. Coulter failed to address Senator McCarthy's fundamental inability to actually identify even a single Communist spy operating within the United States.

Contemporary use of the term

Since the time of McCarthy and the HUAC investigations, the term McCarthyism has entered American speech as a general term for the use of mass pressure, harassment, or blacklisting used to pressure people to follow popular political beliefs. The act of making insufficiently supported accusations or engaging in unbalanced investigations against a person as an attempt to silence or discredit them is often referred to as McCarthyism.

The term has since become synonymous with any perceived government activity that suppresses unfavorable political or social views, often by limiting or suspending civil rights under the pretext of maintaining national security.

External links

Anti-communism | Censorship in the United States | History of anti-communism in the United States | Mass hysteria | Cold War

Background

Origin of the term

Tensions of the times

Alleged victims of McCarthyism

People called by the House Un-American Activities Committee

People called by the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee

Others

Reactions

Continuing controversy

Critiques

Contemporary use of the term

See also

Further reading

External links

Gourt Home::Gourt :: McCarthyism

Background

Origin of the term

Tensions of the times

Alleged victims of McCarthyism

People called by the House Un-American Activities Committee

People called by the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee

Others

Reactions

Continuing controversy

Critiques

Contemporary use of the term

See also

Further reading

External links