McCarthyism

11 Key excerpts on "McCarthyism"

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  Education in a Cultural War Era

  Thinking Philosophically about the Practice of Cancelling

  • Mordechai Gordon(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3

  CANCELLING DURING THE McCARTHY ERA

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003214984-4

  Introduction

  Many Americans have heard of the term McCarthyism and are aware of this dark period in the history of the United States post-World War II that involved an attempt by the government to combat the red menace and prosecute communists and other leftist leaders. Yet, the information that Americans generally get about the McCarthy era (1946–1954) tends to be surface level and consists of only one aspect of this somber period—the hearings led by the Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy that were aimed at outing, blacklisting, and punishing Communist leaders and groups. Missing from most Americans’ understanding of the McCarthy era is an awareness of the bigger picture, a sense of the various factors that converged to shape what scholars have called “the great American Red Scare” (e.g., Fried, 1997; Steinberg, 1984).

  This chapter seeks to provide readers with a sense of the bigger picture, that is, an appreciation of those political, social, and legal dynamics that played a role in the persecution and cancelling of Communist leaders and other citizens in the United States post-World War II. In particular, I outline four factors that need to be taken into account if we are to adequately make sense of this grim period of American history: the Truman Loyalty Program and his administration’s efforts to curtail the left; various laws like the Smith Act and the Internal Security Act that were designed to restrict the freedoms of those who opposed the government of the United States; the hearings organized by McCarthy and other Congressional committees to target Communist groups and individuals; and finally, the role that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI played in the surveillance and punishment of American Communists. Following the analysis of these key factors, I examine a couple of case studies of individuals persecuted during the McCarthy era in order to personalize the consequences faced by actual people. I conclude this chapter by reflecting on the legal and political legacy of the McCarthy era, a legacy that negatively impacted the United States for years thereafter.

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  Terrorism in America

  • J. Lutz(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  fear and suspicion—not only of communism and radicals, but also sometimes of anything new or different. This reaction has since come to be known as McCarthyism, named after Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, who was at the center of per- secutions of individuals suspected of being leftists, or worse, spies. McCarthyism involved some marginal violence and overreactions from the public and the government, including efforts at intimidation and repression that left many ruined lives. The reaction to the possible presence of Soviet spies and collabora- tors on U.S. soil led to a number of repressive security policies of the government. Loyalty oaths became a requirement for some govern- ment jobs, and all communist organizations were required to register with the Justice Department. Individuals belonging to communist groups or supporters of other forms of totalitarianism (Nazism, fas- cism) were not allowed to migrate to the United States or even to get a visa for a visit. 2 Although government attempts to limit the influence of radical ideas were similar in some respects to actions taken during the Red Scare, they did not constitute terrorism. Violence by the pub- lic against presumed communists was less likely than it was during the Red Scare. There were a few attacks by local citizens. In some cases, local government officials and police tolerated violence against leftists as they had after World War I, and those that did attack presumed communists or others could do so without fear of arrest. 3 The suspi- cion that many unions had been infiltrated by communists increased the likelihood of union efforts facing violent responses. 4 Of course, owners faced with union agitation found it convenient to label labor union organizers as communists or to pretend to believe that they were communists, but sometimes there was the genuine belief that the unions had been infiltrated by radicals or that they were a dangerous influence in general.

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  Bad Old Days

  The Myth of the 1950s

  • Alan J. Levine(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  In the 1950s and 1960s, opponents of McCarthyism defined it as the wave of false, or at least wholly irresponsible, charges of Communism and espionage made by Senator McCarthy and such imitators as William Jenner, Harold Velde, and perhaps, the more cautious, or cleverer, Richard Nixon, that attracted public attention from roughly 1950-1954. No one, or at least no one taken seriously even by liberals, suggested in the 1950s that it was not legitimate to keep Communists out of sensitive posts, or that there were no Soviet spies in the United States; McCarthyism was a particular sort of extremism. The present writer has no problem with this traditional understanding of McCarthyism.

  Unfortunately, that is not the only one around. Since the late 1960s, conceptions of McCarthyism have been so altered or embroidered that many bear little resemblance to that of the contemporary critics; in fact they sometimes invert it. Thanks to revisionist historians of the Cold War, such as Richard Freeland and Athan Theoharis, a sort of snowballing definition of McCarthyism began to develop. The first step was associating virtually any concern whatever with internal security or Soviet espionage with McCarthyism—so that President Truman and his administration, Joe McCarthy’s chief target, could be bracketed with McCarthyism and blamed for it. Many went further, and proceeded to pretend that all those convicted in the spy cases of the late 1940s and early 1950s—especially Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs—were the innocent victims of frame-ups. The next step was to treat practically any opposition to Communism as a manifestation of McCarthyism—a stance strongly advocated by Ellen Schrecker, the best-known contemporary academic authority on McCarthyism. This tendency reached an extreme in David Caute’s well-known book, The Great Fear , and ended in a curious inversion. To Caute and similar people, the real villains were the Truman administration and anti-Communists in general; to them, McCarthy was not so bad, because his antics actually helped discredit the anti-Communist side. As a later critic sourly observed, by the 1970s, on the further left, to call a Communist

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  The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression

  One Hundred Decisions

  • Robert M. Lichtman(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  Defining the McCarthy Era

      The more remarkable aspect of the McCarthy era is not that political repression occurred but that its duration and scope were so broad. A combination of circumstances and events following World War II, international and domestic, quite predictably held the seeds of repression:

  • With the glow of America’s victory still fresh and a period of peace and normality in prospect, the Soviet Union, a valued ally in the war, abruptly became a dangerous antagonist, forging a bloc of satellite Communist nations and seeking aggressively to expand its influence throughout the world.1
  • The confrontation was not only military and economic but also overtly ideological. Soviet Communism proclaimed itself the wave of the future that would engulf and replace American capitalism.
  • In the United States there existed a history of hostility to foreign ideologies and Communism in particular (for example, the post–World War I “Red Scare”), along with a visible and outspoken American Communist Party (CPUSA), which endorsed virtually every twist and turn of Soviet policy.2
  • In the summer of 1948, public concern over Soviet espionage utilizing American Communists was triggered by the testimony of ex-Communist Elizabeth Bentley that she served, until her defection in 1945, as a courier for Soviet spy rings composed largely of American Communists employed in federal agencies. Her testimony was buttressed by that of another ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers. The individuals they accused included Alger Hiss, a former State Department official who accompanied FDR to Yalta.3

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  Thinking Clearly

  Cases in Journalistic Decision-Making

  • Tom Rosenstiel, Amy S. Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, Amy Mitchell(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  McCarthyism, 1950–1954

  JOHN HERBERS

  EDITORS’ NOTE

  In the early years of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, rose to prominence by making charges, most of them unsubstantiated, that the United States government had been widely infiltrated by Soviet spies. Critics accused the American press of allowing the senator to manipulate the coverage, giving birth to the term McCarthyism.

  As a reporter for the Southern newspapers’ United Press during the McCarthy era, author John Herbers brings personal knowledge to this case. He also spent twenty-four years reporting for the New York Times, where he covered, among other stories, civil rights, the Kennedy presidential campaign, and the Watergate years.

  In this narrative, Herbers focuses on two of the many issues suggested by coverage of McCarthy. First, the case explores the difference between reporting the facts and reporting the truth about the facts. It touches on how, in practical terms, a journalist can navigate between the two. Second, it examines the issue of speed—the pressure to get the story.

  During the McCarthy era, journalists operated according to a strict code of factual reporting and avoided analysis. They nonetheless felt the pressure of their own morning and afternoon deadlines, as well as those of several wire services.

  Today, whereas journalists have more freedom to analyze, the pressure of the 24-7 news cycle, the frequency of live broadcasts, the sophistication of sources, and an increase in the number of news outlets all create difficulties surprisingly similar to those faced in the 1950s.

  Could McCarthyism happen today?

  Following the Allied victory of 1945 that ended World War II, the world was polarized between the western democracies and the communist blocs of Russia and Asia, both seeking global domination. Deep divisions evolved in the United States over how best to deal internally with the threat now posed by the nation’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union. There was a broad consensus that persons loyal to the communists should not be allowed to work in sensitive positions within the federal government. But a strong movement developed among certain political leaders and opinion makers that the government and others had been too lax in demanding loyalty to the United States.

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  Cold War and McCarthy Era

  People and Perspectives

  • Caroline S. Emmons(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Nevertheless, McCarthy’s sensational speech, delivered on February 9, 1950, in front of a group of Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed that the State Department knowingly employed Communists, brought national attention to this little-known Wisconsin senator and proved to be the opening act in a political drama that dominated Washington for several years. McCarthyism is, in some ways, a misleading term because it tends to focus attention too narrowly on Joseph McCarthy himself, rather than conveying the true extent of political repression during this period, for which McCarthy himself was only partly responsible. Changes in media coverage helped broadcast the warnings of McCarthy and others. HUAC had already successfully targeted Hollywood and the industry reeled under additional charges and countercharges. Some of the best known actors, directors and screenwriters found themselves black- listed, unable to get work during a time when major studios still exercised strict control through contracts and other forms of reprisals. Those who were called in front of HUAC and other investigative bodies insisted that they had not belonged to any subversive organizations but they refused to provide information about colleagues and friends. They too suffered reprisals. The effects of these ideological struggles in Hollywood led to the production of a number of interesting media which sought directly or through metaphor and other narrative devices to challenge McCarthyism, as Bryan E. Vizzini discusses in his essay on film and other aspects of popu- lar culture during this era. Television was a new medium, appearing at approximately the same time that the Cold War began. Americans were able to watch HUAC hear- ings, news programs depicting the efforts of the military to contain Commu- nism in Korea, and, most notoriously, the efforts of Joseph McCarthy and his associates to use Senate hearings as a way to investigate and expose alleged Communists.

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  American–Soviet Relations

  From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism

  • Peter G. Boyle(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 The Red Scare and Mc Carthyism On 9 February 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy said in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that

  While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.1

  McCarthy’s astounding charge triggered off four years of national hysteria which had been building up since 1945 and which reached its climax in the phenomenon of McCarthyism from 1950 until McCarthy’s condemnation by the Senate in December 1954.

  The Red Scare arose partly from rational concerns over Soviet expansionist ambitions and possible infiltration into the US government of American Communists whose ideological allegiance to the Soviet Union was stronger than their national loyalty to the United States. To a much greater extent, however, McCarthyism arose from irrational and emotional factors within American society in the late 1940s and early 1950s. McCarthy’s charge that there were 205 members of the Communist Party employed by the State Department in 1950 provided a vivid example of the irrationality of McCarthyism. McCarthy’s accusation, when considered in a literal sense, was staggering. Its absurdity in a literal sense was easily demonstrable, but this missed the deeper significance of McCarthy’s accusations. McCarthy had hit a responsive chord in the fears, anxieties, suspicions, frustrations and other such emotional concerns of Americans of the time. An analysis of these emotional responses of the American people during the Red Scare reveals significant aspects of American attitudes towards Communism which played an important role in shaping American policy towards the Soviet Union.

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  The Cold War Comes to Main Street

  America in 1950

  • Lisle A. Rose(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  Both men had been sympathetic to young foreign service officers in Chongqing, who in 1944 and 1945 had insisted that Mao and his communist followers should be considered the true voices of China. 12 In the context of the Hiss and Fuchs affairs, Lucas, like Peurifoy, could no longer ignore McCarthy’s claims, however wild and unsubstantiated they might have seemed. Two days after McCarthy’s marathon performance on the Senate floor, Lucas received permission from the Democratic congressional conference to propose a resolution authorizing a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to look into McCarthy’s indictments. It passed unanimously. Shortly thereafter, Herbert Block, the renowned political cartoonist of the Washington Post, coined the word “McCarthyism.” The term was meant to be condemnatory; McCarthy shrewdly exploited it as a movement. 13 And a movement it swiftly became. For more than forty years, scholars and journalists have argued about whether McCarthyism was rooted deep in the American past or was simply a spasmodic response to postwar frustrations. Was it a broad movement of social protest or merely a reaction by angry Republicans to repeated defeats and embarrassments? 14 McCarthyism remains elusive because its critics have concentrated on the man and have extrapolated the movement from what he said and what he did. Political scientist Willmoore Kendall wrote in 1963 that “the issue was Joe McCarthy himself.” Thirty-two years later, another political scientist, David H. Bennett, insisted that McCarthyism “could not endure” beyond McCarthy himself and the immediate postwar conditions that made him. Once Eisenhower fashioned a new, more moderate political culture in 1954, McCarthyism lost its rationale and drive. 15 But Kendall and Bennett are wrong. McCarthy was not a lone political vigilante as he is often depicted; he was not a shoot-out artist who single-handedly blazed away at the liberal establishment

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  The War of Nerves

  Inside the Cold War Mind

  • Martin Sixsmith(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wellcome Collection

    (Publisher)

  By the mid 1950s, America seemed to be following the model of the Soviet Union, which had long promoted political commitment in its young people. The communist youth organisation, the Komsomol, taught its fledgling recruits that they must prize loyalty to the state more highly than loyalty to friends and family. Its poster boy was a thirteen-year-old named Pavlik Morozov, who in 1932 denounced his father as an enemy of the people. Pavlik’s father was sent to die in a labour camp, while Pavlik himself was subsequently murdered by angry, bourgeois-lackey relatives. The story of his noble self-sacrifice was learned by every schoolchild, his portraits and statues installed in schools and colleges.

  Textbooks in American schools began to be similarly endorsed with instructions to children on how they should root out the communists in their classrooms, teachers as well as students. For the 1955 school year, the textbook Exploring American History , carried the following advice to pupils.

  The FBI urges Americans to report directly to its offices any suspicions they may have about Communist activity on the part of their fellow Americans. The FBI is expertly trained to sift out the truth of such reports under the laws of our free nation. When Americans handle their suspicions in this way, rather than by gossip and publicity, they are acting in line with American traditions.26

  For an America struggling to define itself, McCarthy’s simplistic prescription – that we define ourselves by opposition to the ‘other’ of Soviet communism – had a seductive appeal. His explanation for America’s woes – that they are the work of the hostile ‘other’ – was reminiscent of Stalin’s policy of exculpating the nation for its own failings by ramping up a unifying hostility to an external bogeyman. The witch-hunt was a staple of Soviet life, where saboteurs and wreckers were always to blame; in the US, the role would be taken by Reds under the bed.

  McCarthyism nurtured moral panic. The sociologist Howard Becker described him as a ‘moral entrepreneur’, raising the spectre of ‘deviant’ subcultures in order to persuade others to join his crusade, to create new societal rules and to promote themselves in the process.27 McCarthy, said Richard Hofstadter, was ‘an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life’, the paranoid conspiracy theorist who spreads fear and panic to gain notoriety.28

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  America in the Cold War

  A Reference Guide

  • William T. Walker(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

  McCarthyism, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Culture of the Cold War

  The decade of the 1950s began with the emergence of Senator Joseph McCarthy as a strident and reckless anticommunist, the formalization of American Cold War policy in the top secret National Security Council (NSC) Report 68, the outbreak of the Korean War, and American society and culture continuing to adapt to a new reality—the ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union and living in the nuclear age. The decade witnessed the conviction and execution of spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; two successful campaigns for the presidency by Dwight D. Eisenhower; the death of Stalin and the rise of Khrushchev; the rapid expansion of the American economy and the Soviet Union’s slow recovery from the ravages of World War II; demands for civil rights for African Americans; demonstrations for political, economic, and civil liberties in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary; American supported coup d’états in Iran and Guatemala; a developing crisis in Southeast Asia (Indo-China/Vietnam); the development of ballistic missile technologies by the Soviet Union and the United States; and revolution in Cuba.

  With the Soviet success in detonating an atomic bomb, the fall of China to communists, and the establishment of NATO, President Truman on January 31, 1950, directed that the National Security Council establish a study group consisting of State and Defense Department leaders along with others appointed by Truman to review the challenges that confronted the United States and to develop a comprehensive strategy. The study group was formed immediately and was headed by Paul Nitze. It submitted its report to the NSC (NSC-68; see Document 7 ) on April 7, and the NSC sent it to Truman on April 14. While it was based on George Kennan’s policy of containment, NSC-68 focused more on American military capabilities than diplomacy. It argued that what was a stake in the Cold War was the survival of the United States and Western civilization, that it could become necessary to triple defense expenditures, and that initial outlays could require extensive funding. Fundamentally, NSC-68 recommended a strategy that would both defend the United States and its allies and defeat the Soviet Union in the event of war. Truman did not accept NSC-68 when it was presented—he wanted more specifics and feared the economic impact of financing it. Some of Truman’s advisers thought that implementing NSC-68 would escalate the Cold War and aggravate the already poor relationship with the Soviet Union. The debate on NSC-68 evaporated with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Truman signed NCS-68 on September 30, 1950, but demanded additional budgetary reviews through 1951. NSC-68 remained a guiding document in American Cold War strategy for a generation.1

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  McCarthyism and the Red Scare

  A Reference Guide

  • William T. Walker(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  In particular, he referred repeatedly to Acheson’s pre-invasion statements that Korea was not in the U.S. sphere of influence or interest. 54 McCarthyism AND THE RED SCARE McCarthyism received support with the passage of the McCarran Act (also known as the Internal Security Act of 1950) over Truman’s veto on September 23, 1950. Sponsored by the right-wing Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), this measure embodied many of the ideas that had been included in the Mundt-Nixon Bill that had emerged from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAA) in 1947; it was passed by the House of Representatives in 1948 but was not approved by the Senate at that time. During the summer of 1950, the measure resurfaced and gained extensive support. Basically, it extended the powers of the federal government and impinged upon freedoms that were guaranteed by the First and Fifth Amendments. It expanded the federal government’s rights in detaining suspects and in search proceedings. Liberals responded by suggesting the bill be limited to situations that the president declares “internal security emergencies.” Both the Senate and the House approved the McCarran Act with significant majorities, but Truman vetoed it; they responded by over-riding his veto. Many liberals, including Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, voted for the measure and the override; the ques- tion is why, the answer is the elections of the fall 1950 were upon them and they could not take the risk of being defeated for their refusal to sup- port the McCarran Act. The passage of this measure over the veto of the President Truman was a measure of the support—or fear of—for McCa- rthyism. Throughout the country the Republican and Democratic can- didates’ support for McCarthy served as a litmus test for the primary and general elections. Republicans saw McCarthyism as a means of regaining majorities in both the Senate and the House. Richard Nixon used McCa- rthy’s tactics in his successful race against Sen.

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