Transcript The Second Red Scare

General Statement 1
In the immediate aftermath of
World War II, the United States took
a turn to the economic and political
right.
Nothing demonstrated this shift
more than the Second Red Scare.
Trials, denouncements, black lists, and
paranoia about Communism
the international struggle between the
Soviet Union and the United States for
world dominance.
Result - the Cold War transformed
anti-Communism from a right-wing to a
mainstream ideology.
The Second Red Scare
On May 26, 1938, Congress organized
the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) to investigate
American Fascists and Communists,
After the war it gained strength and
began to investigate left-wing
Americans who might be communist
sympathizers.
This search led HUAC to Hollywood in
1947, where left-leaning actors, writers,
and directors were allegedly spreading
subversive communist messages
through their movies.
The Second Red Scare
One young actor who was
ready to name names was
future President Ronald
Reagan.
HUAC did not uncover any of
the systematic subversion it had
alleged in Hollywood.
Nevertheless, since being
questioned or mentioned during
a hearing was, in the minds of
many studio executives, an
indication of guilt.
Suspected leftists found
themselves on a blacklist - shut
them out of jobs in cinema,
radio, television, and theater
years.
The Cold War
 The Soviet Union and the United
States former allies
 Why?
 Different people have different
views on the origins of the Cold
War:
 All the fault of the Soviet Union
 All the fault of the United States
 All of the above
Truman loyalty
program
In 1947, as part of this growing anticommunist hysteria, President Harry
Truman ordered the Justice Department
to draw up a list of possible
"subversives" in government.
Under the terms of this loyalty
program, the federal government could
dismiss an employee "if reasonable
grounds exist for belief that the person
involved is disloyal.
The Trial of Alger Hiss
Took place from 1948 to 1950
Harvard-educated New Dealer who had come
to Washington during the Roosevelt
administration.
President of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace.
His accuser named Whittaker Chambers, a
senior editor of Time magazine.
Chambers accused Hiss of having spied for the
Soviet Union in the 1930s when Hiss had been
employed at the State Department.
Chambers claimed that he and Hiss had
belonged to the same espionage ring and that
Hiss had given him copies of secret State
Department documents.
A young California Congressman named
Richard M. Nixon took up the case
Chambers claimed that a he had hidden a
microfilm of the secret documents in a pumpkin
field near his farm,
The Trial of Alger
Hiss
The statute of limitations for an espionage charge had
expired
The federal government prosecuted Hiss was for perjury.
The result of the first trial was a hung jury.
After the second trial, a jury found Hiss guilty and
sentenced him to five years in prison.
Hiss struggled to prove his innocence for decades.
When Hiss was 87, a Russian general in charge of Soviet
intelligence archives declared that Hiss had never been a
spy
McCarthyism
Republican party leadership
considered him a legislative
lightweight.
February 9, 1950, he dropped a
political bombshell.
McCarthy gave a speech at the
Republican Women's Club of
Wheeling, West Virginia, where he
claimed to have a list of 205
Communists in the State
Department.
No one in the press actually saw
the names on the list, but
McCarthy's announcement made
the national news.
McCarthyism
McCarthy continued to repeat his
groundless charges and the number of
Communists on his list fluctuated from
speech to speech.
Launched attacked the Truman
administration. McCarthy labeled
Secretary of State Dean Acheson "Red
Dean."
He also claimed that World War II
General George Marshall had been
"hoodwinked into aiding a great
conspiracy."
Not winning the Korean War (1950-53)
also gave credibility to the argument that
"subversives" were at work in the
government
Conformity
McCarthy's attacks emerged within a
climate of political and social conformity.
During this time, for example, one state
required pro wrestlers to take a loyalty oath
before stepping into the ring.
In Indiana, a group of anti-communists
indicted Robin Hood (and its vaguely
socialistic message that the book's titular
hero had a right to rob from the rich and
give to the poor) forced librarians to pull the
book from the shelves.
Baseball's Cincinnati Reds renamed
themselves the "Redlegs."
"Miss Loyalty" beauty contests became
the rage.
McCarthy's Supporters
The ranks of McCarthy's
supporters were generally defined
along political, religious, and
occupational lines. They typically
included:
Republicans
Catholics
Conservative Protestants
Blue-collar workers
The Fall of McCarthy
Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House
McCarthy's campaigns against subversion
in the government became an attack on his
own party
Spring of 1954, tables turned when
McCarthy charged that the United States
Army had promoted a dentist accused of
being a Communist.
Television broadcast allowed the general
public to see the Senator as a blustering
bully
his investigations seen as a misguided
scam.
The Fall of McCarthy
Joseph Welch, a Boston
attorney in The McCarthy Army
heroes said “"You've done
enough. Have you no sense of
decency, sir? At long last, have
you left no sense of decency?"
This lawyers stand on national
television broke the spell
McCarthy had on the nation.
The Senate votes in 1954 to
censure him.
General Statement
 The Cold War and the spread of
Communism in Eastern Europe,
China, and Korea in the late 1940s
and early 1950s prompted the United
States to increase dramatically its
defense spending. As more and
more companies came to rely on
defense contracts, the power of the
military-industrial complex grew