When was mccarthyism established

Personal secrets were seen as a liability that exposed one to blackmail. Religious conservatives championed the idea of traditional nuclear god-fearing family as a bulwark against the spread of atheistic totalitarianism. 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. 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.

Joseph McCarthy, an Irish Catholic, made common cause with prominent religious anti-communists, including southern evangelist Billy James Hargis of Christian Crusade , a popular radio and television ministry that peaked in the s and s.

Cold War religion in America also crossed the political divide. Though publicly rebuked by the Tydings Committee, McCarthy soldiered on. During the campaign, Eisenhower, who was in all things moderate and politically cautious, refused to publicly denounce McCarthy. McCarthy campaigned for Eisenhower, who won a stunning victory. So did the Republicans, who regained Congress. Soon he went after the U. 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.

Cassius was right. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? Humiliated, McCarthy faded into irrelevance and alcoholism and died in May , at age By the late s, the worst of the second red scare was over.

With Alger Hiss's perjury conviction and the confession of Klaus Fuchs, a physicist on the Manhattan Project, to having delivered atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, it was clear that government security had been compromised. Particularly disturbing to average citizens was the Soviet Union's new atomic capability.

Fearful Americans began to view all communists as traitors to our country. The stage was set for the freshman senator from Wisconsin. At the time of his chairmanship, the jurisdiction of the subcommittee was principally the investigation of waste, inefficiency, impropriety, and illegality of government operations. McCarthy manipulated the workings of the new committee to continue sweeping accusations of communist activity in the executive branch.

His probe of the U. Army lead to his downfall. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised nationally, and the public recoiled from McCarthy's bullying tactics. He was censured by the Senate and died in State Department, the second Red Scare predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single maverick politician.

Members of these committees and their staff cooperated with the FBI to identify and pursue alleged subversives. The federal employee loyalty program, formalized in by President Harry Truman in response to right-wing allegations that his administration harbored Communist spies, soon was imitated by local and state governments as well as private employers. The second Red Scare did not involve pogroms or gulags, but the fear of unemployment was a powerful tool for stifling criticism of the status quo, whether in economic policy or social relations.

Ostensibly seeking to protect democracy by eliminating communism from American life, anticommunist crusaders ironically undermined democracy by suppressing the expression of dissent. The second Red Scare refers to the anticommunist fervor that permeated American politics, society, and culture from the late s through the s, during the opening phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

This episode lasted longer and was more pervasive than the first Red Scare, which followed World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of State Department, the second Red Scare in fact predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single politician. But that term is too narrow to capture the complex origins, diverse manifestations, and sprawling cast of characters involved in the multidimensional conflict that was the second Red Scare.

Defining the American Communist Party as a serious threat to national security, government and nongovernment actors at national, state, and local levels developed a range of mechanisms for identifying and punishing Communists and their alleged sympathizers. For two people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, espionage charges resulted in execution. Many thousands of Americans faced congressional committee hearings, FBI investigations, loyalty tests, and sedition laws; negative judgements in those arenas brought consequences ranging from imprisonment to deportation, loss of passport, or, most commonly, long-term unemployment.

Interpretations of the second Red Scare have ranged between two poles, one emphasizing the threat posed to national security by the Communist Party and the other emphasizing the threat to democracy posed by political repression.

In the s, newly accessible Soviet and U. Scholars disagree about whether all these people understood themselves to be engaged in espionage and about how much damage they did to national security, but it is clear that the threat of espionage was real. So too, however, was repression in the name of catching spies.

The second Red Scare remains a hotly debated topic because Americans continue to differ on the optimal balance between security and liberty and how to achieve it. Anticommunism has taken especially virulent forms in the United States because of distinctive features of its political tradition.

This popular predisposition in turn has been easier for powerful interests to exploit in the American context because of the absence of a parliamentary system which elsewhere produced a larger number of political parties as well as stronger party discipline and of a strong civil service bureaucracy.

Great Britain, a U. Explaining American anticommunism requires an assessment of American communism. The 19th-century writings of Karl Marx gave birth to an international socialist movement that denounced capitalism for exploiting the working class. Some socialists pursued reform through existing political systems while others advocated revolution. The American Communist Party CPUSA , established in , belonged to the Moscow-based Comintern, which provided funding and issued directives, ostensibly to encourage Communist revolutions around the world but in practice to support Soviet foreign-policy objectives.

The CPUSA remained small and factionalized until the international economic crisis and the rise of European fascism in the s increased its appeal. Not always aware of the participation of Communists, diverse activists worked through hundreds of Popular Front organizations on behalf of labor, racial and religious minorities, and civil liberties. The Popular Front period ended abruptly in August , when the Soviet and German leaders signed a nonaggression pact. In William Z.

Riven by internal disputes and increasingly under attack from anticommunists, the CPUSA became more isolated. Its numbers had dwindled to below 10, by , when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev officially acknowledged what many American Communists had refused to believe: that Stalin had been responsible for the death of millions in forced labor camps and in executions of political rivals. As the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, American Communists were neither devils nor saints.

The party was a dynamic part of the broader Left that in the s and s advanced the causes of labor, minority rights, and feminism. Anticommunists were less unified than their adversary; diverse constituencies mobilized against communism at different moments. Employers often enlisted local law officers and private detectives in their efforts to quell labor militancy, which they cast as unpatriotic. The correlation between labor unrest and anticommunist zeal was enduring. The first major Red Scare emerged during the postwar strike wave of and produced the initial infrastructure for waging war on domestic communism.

Diverse strikes across the nation coincided with a series of mail bombings by anarchists. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer charged that these events were evidence of a revolutionary conspiracy. Palmer directed the young J. Edgar Hoover, head of the General Intelligence Division of the Bureau of Investigation later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI , to arrest radicals and their associates and to deport the foreign born among them.

The ensuing raids and surveillance activities violated civil liberties, and in the bureau was reined in. But Hoover became FBI director, a position he would hold until his death in Intensely anticommunist, and prone to associating any challenge to the economic or social status quo with communism, Hoover would be a key player in the second Red Scare. Chamber of Commerce. After the wartime federal sedition and espionage laws expired, and after the FBI was curbed, state and local officials took primary responsibility for fighting communism.

By thirty-five states had passed sedition or criminal syndicalism laws the latter directed chiefly at labor organizations and vaguely defined to prohibit sabotage or other crimes committed in the name of political reform. The limitations of the American Federation of Labor AFL in organizing mass-production industries led to the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO , which organized workers regardless of craft into industry-wide unions such as the United Automobile Workers.

Encouraged by the National Labor Relations Act of , the CIO pioneered aggressive tactics such as the sit-down strike and further distinguished itself from the AFL with its organizing efforts among women and racial minorities. Charges of communism were especially common in response to labor protests by African Americans in the South and by Mexican Americans in the West.

Education was another anticommunist concern during the interwar period. By , twenty-one states required loyalty oaths for teachers. School boards and state legislatures investigated allegations of subversion among teachers and college professors. Throughout this period, the federal role in fighting communism consisted mainly of using immigration law to keep foreign-born radicals out of the country, but the FBI continued to monitor the activities of Communists and their alleged sympathizers.

The political and legal foundations of the second Red Scare thus were under construction well before the Cold War began. In Congress, a conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats had crystallized by Congressional conservatives disliked many New Deal policies—from public works to consumer protection to, above all, labor rights—and they frequently charged that the administering agencies were influenced by Communists.

For his chief investigator, Dies hired J. Matthews forged a career path for ex-leftists whose perceived expertise was valuable to congressional committees, the FBI, and anti—New Deal media magnates such as William Randolph Hearst. In one early salvo against the Roosevelt administration, Dies Committee members called for the impeachment of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins because she refused to deport the Communist labor leader Harry Bridges; Perkins claimed correctly that she did not have the legal authority to deport him.

The Smith Act made it illegal to advocate overthrow of the government, effectively criminalizing membership in the Communist Party, and allowed deportation of aliens who ever had belonged to a seditious organization. To enforce the Hatch Act, the U. FBI agents interviewed government employees who admitted having or were alleged to have associations with any listed group. In the hyper-suspicious atmosphere of the Cold War, insinuations of disloyalty were enough to convince many Americans that their government was packed with traitors and spies.

It was not until he attacked the Army in that his actions earned him the censure of the U. In August , for instance, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. All of these factors combined to create an atmosphere of fear and dread, which proved a ripe environment for the rise of a staunch anticommunist like Joseph McCarthy. The next month, a Senate subcommittee launched an investigation and found no proof of any subversive activity.

Still, the senator continued his so-called Red-baiting campaign. In , at the beginning of his second term as senator, McCarthy was put in charge of the Committee on Government Operations, which allowed him to launch even more expansive investigations of the alleged communist infiltration of the federal government.

In hearing after hearing, he aggressively interrogated witnesses in what many came to perceive as a blatant violation of their civil rights. Almost at once, the aura of invulnerability that had surrounded McCarthy for nearly five years began to disappear. The American people watched as McCarthy intimidated witnesses and offered evasive responses when questioned.