When was mccarthyism and the red scare

Supreme Court upheld Red Scare policies , including a law that banned Communist teachers from New York public schools. It's that collaboration that made it so powerful. Regardless of motive, the crackdown had the cumulative effect of strangling progressive activism. These hearings corralled their subjects in such a way that even remaining silent could be a crime. After refusing to answer the committee's questions, they were convicted of contempt of Congress, sentenced to prison, and blacklisted by Hollywood.

Other defendants in the industry who pleaded their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination were also ostracized. If a defendant denied involvement in the Communist Party, the prosecution would bring in an FBI or ex-Communist witness who would insist the defendant was Communist, so they could claim the defendant had committed perjury.

To avoid jail and maintain their livelihoods, activists watered down their philosophies. The era had major effects on the civil and labor rights movements , forcing individuals to obscure their personal politics. One such case may have been that of Mary Keyserling, a feminist, labor, and civil rights activist who worked in the Department of Commerce.

She was eventually cleared a second time, but left her job in and did not work in government again until In an article about Keyserling, history professor Landon R. Storrs notes that she was probably not a Communist, but her personal papers suggest occasional socialist leanings and Communist sympathies. The era of McCarthyism was over. Ike had helped bring it to a bitter end. In the late s and early s, 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 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 s and early s.

Edgar Hoover calling on law enforcement officers, patriotic organizations, and individuals to report on anything that might indicate espionage, sabotage, or subversive activities. In this episode, from April , 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.

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 and In this November 24, , address over radio and television, McCarthy turned an attack on former President Truman to questions directed at Eisenhower.

McCarthy died of liver failure on May 2, He was seldom in his Senate seat and his advice, seldom offered, was little heeded. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B.

Bush Bill Clinton George W. Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center. University of Virginia Miller Center. FBI agents interviewed government employees who admitted having or were alleged to have associations with any listed group.

When most of those employees were retained, the Dies Committee charged that CSC examiners themselves had subversive tendencies. The Roosevelt administration and its supporters dismissed Dies and his ilk as fanatics, but in accusations that Communists had infiltrated government agencies began to get traction.

The second Red Scare derived its momentum from fears that Communist spies in powerful government positions were manipulating U. 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, additional agents.

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.

Those grounds usually consisted of a list of individually minor associations that dated back to the s. 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.

Loyalty standards tightened as the political terrain shifted. During the summer of , the ex-Communists Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers testified before HUAC that in the s and early s 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 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.

Senator McCarthy claimed to explain those events by alleging that Communists had infiltrated the U. State Department. Congress then in effect broadened the loyalty program by passing Public Law , 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. That same month the U. 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, employees who were cleared after full investigation under the standard, for example, at least 2, saw their cases reopened under the standard. Employees who had been cleared never knew when their case might be reopened. Even after the loyalty program was curbed in the late s, the FBI continued to keep tabs on former loyalty defendants.

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. 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 , 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 that approximately 20 percent of the U.

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. 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. As countersubversives issued a steady flow of accusations, the cloud of suspicion expanded. It listed 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. Groups were added to the U.

Very few of the roughly organizations on the official list engaged in illegal activity. Rather than take chances, many people stopped belonging to organizations. The second Red Scare also reshaped the American labor movement. Top CIO leaders tolerated Communists at first, valuing their dedication and hoping to avoid internal division and external attack. Many trade union members, especially Catholics, were intensely anticommunist and stepped up their effort to oust Communists from their leadership.

In 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. The expulsions embittered many workers and labor allies, and they did not prevent right-wing groups from associating trade unionism with communism.

With a Republican in the White House as a result of the 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.

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.

Army led to televised hearings beginning in April , which gave viewers an extended opportunity to see McCarthy in action. 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 and , and under Chief Justice Earl Warren the court issued several rulings that limited the mechanisms designed to identify and punish Communists. In and , the court held that the federal loyalty program could apply only to employees in sensitive positions. One government personnel director opined in that 90 percent of the people who had been dismissed on loyalty grounds in the early s 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. The loyalty programs and blacklists wound down, but anticommunism remained a potent force through the s and beyond.

Targets soon included participants in the civil rights, anti—Vietnam War, and feminist movements. Scholarship on the second Red Scare has emerged in waves, responding to the availability of new sources, changing historical methodologies, and shifting political contexts. Initial debates centered on assessing the causes of, or motivations behind, the anticommunist furor.

Some accounts emphasized the partisan pressures from Republicans and southern Democrats on the Truman administration. 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. Edgar Hoover, who put citizens under illegal surveillance, leaked information to congressional conservatives, and stood by informants known to be unreliable.

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. The tenor of debate shifted again when the end of the Cold War made available new evidence from Soviet archives and U. 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 , was almost certainly guilty of espionage.

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.

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.

Scholarship since the late 20th century has tried to transcend the old debates by turning to new approaches.