McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare

Hello everyone! It's been a bit since my last post; I've been busy with the last few days of school (I'm a middle school teacher, for any readers who didn't know), recording for season two of "The Half-Pint Historian Podcast", I started a part-time job for the summer which will turn into working nights and weekends during the school year, I've been lesson planning for the upcoming school year in September, and I've just been experiencing life in general. In any case, let's pick up where we left off!


American confidence was shaken by the Soviet possession of an atomic bomb, and the failure to win a decisive victory in the long stalemate in Korea further worried Americans. Due to these, American fears were realized at home.

Americans had absorbed a number of blows during the Cold War. Soviet possession of atomic weapons, the fall of China to the Communists, and the stalemate in Korea all led to worries about the ability of the US to defeat communism. Many Americans worried that Communist sympathizers and spies might be secretly working to overthrow the US government.

Two cases at this time seized public attention. In the first case, Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was accused of passing government secrets to Soviet agents. Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, had been a Communist during the 1930s. In 1948, Chambers appeared before a committee of the House of Representatives where he claimed that in the 1930s Hiss had given him top secret papers to pass to the Soviet Union. Hiss strongly denied passing any secret papers to the Soviet Union and sued Chambers for making false accusations. Then, Chambers produced copies of the papers. They became known as the “pumpkin papers” because Chambers had hidden them on microfilm in a pumpkin in his garden. So many years had passed that Hiss couldn’t remember the crime he committed and because it had been so long, Hiss couldn’t be charged with spying; he was, however, charged with perjury (lying under oath) to the congressional committee and spent several years in prison.

Fears about America’s security rose even higher in 1950 when several Americans were arrested on charges of passing the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets. In the most famous trial of the times, a married couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were found guilty of supplying information to the Soviet Union. They were sentenced to death. A worldwide outcry arose, but the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953.

Today, more than half a century after the trials of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, their roles are still debated. However, many questions of their involvement have been resolved. In the 1990s, the US government released copies of secret Soviet messages that had been decoded after years of dedicated work. The messages appeared to show that both Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg had in fact spied for the Soviets; Ethel apparently was aware of the spying and may even have assisted her husband.


McCarthyism

A climate of fear contributed to the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy built his career by threatening to expose Communists. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, McCarthy waved a paper in the air and claimed it contained the names of 205 Communists who worked in the State Department…McCarthy later reduced this number of 81, then to 57.

McCarthy refused to show the list to anyone. He didn’t even need to do so because many Americans were eager to believe him. His dramatic charges gained him a large following. During the next four years, McCarthy’s charges became more sensational; he led Senate hearings in which he bullied witnesses and made exaggerated charges. Eventually, the term McCarthyism came to mean accusing someone of disloyalty without having any evidence.

One of the things McCarthy is best known for was the establishment of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which was dedicated, in theory, to finding American Communists in government, show business, and other fields. The committee hearings in 1947 resulted in many people being blacklisted, or denied work in their chosen fields, based solely on suspicions. One group of producers, directors, screenwriters, and actors–known as the Hollywood Ten–refused to testify before the committee. They were sentenced to jail time for their silence and many never worked in Hollywood again after their release. One writer, Dalton Trumbo, got around the blacklist by writing a screenplay under a pseudonym. He won an Academy Award for the screenplay, The Brave One, in 1956.

Aware of McCarthy’s power to destroy careers, few people were brave enough to oppose him and his “red scare” tactics. McCarthy finally lost his following in 1954 when a TV audience of millions saw him make false accusations against the US Army. Many Americans came to realize that McCarthy couldn’t support the charges. Soon after, the US Senate voted to censure, or condemn him. McCarthy died three years later. By that time, the Communist scare was mostly finished.



Next time here on the blog, we're going to examine global concerns in the Cold War.