McCarthyism

McCarthyism took place during a period of intense suspicion in the United States primarily from 1950 to 1954, when the U.S. government was actively countering alleged American Communist Party subversion, its leadership, and others suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. During this period people from all walks of life became the subject of aggressive witch-hunts, often based on inconclusive or questionable evidence. It grew out of the Second Red Scare that began in the late 1940s and is named after the U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin.

Background

In June of 1947, members of the Senate Appropriations Committee sent a confidential report to Secretary of State George Marshall, in which they stated:

It is evident that there is a deliberate calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places, but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity. . . . On file in the Department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States, which involves large numbers of State Department employees. . . this report has been challenged and ignored by those charged with the responsibility of administering the department...

Joseph McCarthy's involvement with the cultural phenomenon that would bear his name began on January 7th, 1950 when the Wisconsin senator asked friends he was dining with for advice on how to make himself known. They suggested taking an anti-communist stand. He began with a speech he made on Lincoln Day, February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of known communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is quoted as saying: "I have here in my hand a list of 57 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department." This speech resulted in a flood of press attention to McCarthy and set him on the path that would characterize the rest of his career and life.

Origin of the term

The term originates from a March 29, 1950 political cartoon by Washington Post editorial cartoonist Herbert Block. The cartoon depicted four leading Republicans trying to push an elephant (the traditional symbol of the Republican Party) to stand on a teetering stack of ten tar buckets, the topmost of which was labeled "McCarthyism."

Tensions of the times

The beginnings of the Cold War can be traced to the mututal distrust between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, which was evident even during World War II, and which increased as it became obvious that the Soviet Union would largely occupy Central and Eastern Europe after the War.

The first major dispute between the British, and U.S. on one side and U.S.S.R on the other was over the future of Poland directly after World War II. At the Yalta Conference, in February, 1945, and again at the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945, the Soviets, British and Americans agreed that the Soviet Union would permit free elections in Poland after the end of World War II in Europe. The Soviets did not permit such elections, however, and by July, 1946, the Soviets were accused by the British and American governments of failing to fulfill their commitments, and wanting to set up a puppet régime so that they could control a buffer state on their western border.

In the meantime, in Bulgaria in February, 1945, under Soviet occupation, the Communist-dominated government arrested hundreds of former royal Bulgarian officials on charges of war crimes. By June the former regents, 22 former ministers and many others had been executed. In September, 1946 the monarchy was abolished by plebiscite. The Communists now openly took power, with a Communist premier and president. Free elections promised for 1946 were blatantly rigged and were boycotted by the opposition. The opposition parties refused to co-operate with the new regime, and in June, 1947 their leaders were arrested. Despite strong international protests, the leader of the opposition Agrarian Party was executed the following September. This marked the final establishment of a Communist regime in Bulgaria.

In March, 1946, armed bands of the Communist movement in Greece, ELAS, infiltrated into Greece through the mountainous regions near the Yugoslav and Albanian borders, and by late 1946 ELAS could deploy about 10,000 partisans in various areas of Greece, mainly in the northern mountains, and open civil war began. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States would step in to support the government of Greece against Communist pressure. By September 1947, the Greek Communist leadership, which had significant popular support, decided to move from guerilla tactics to full-scale conventional war. Hard fighting and atrocities on both sides followed. By July of 1949, however, President Tito of Yugoslavia closed down the Yugoslavian border to the Communist guerrillas and disbanded their camps inside Yugoslavia as a result of his break with Stalin. As a result of this closure and steady military victories by the Greek government over the Communists, with significant material aid by Britain and the United States, a cease-fire on October 16, 1949, marked the end of the Greek Civil War with the victory of the Greek government.

In May, 1946, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia won a plurality of 38 percent of the vote in that country, and the Communist leader Klement Gottwald became premier. Most importantly, although the Communists held only a minority of cabinet positions, they were able to gain control over all key ministries (Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Defence, etc.) On February 20, 1948 the twelve noncommunist ministers resigned, in part, to induce President Edvard Beneš to call for early elections in which they expected the noncommunist parties to prevail; Beneš refused to accept the cabinet resignations and did not call for elections. The Communist-controlled Ministry of Interior began to deploy police regiments to sensitive areas throughout the country and to equip a workers' militia. On February 25, Beneš, perhaps fearing Soviet intervention, capitulated. He accepted the resignations of the dissident ministers and received a new cabinet list from Gottwald, thus completing the Communist takeover. On March 10, 1948, the anti-communist Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, was found dead, dressed in his pyjamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial investigation by the Communist-controlled police stated that he committed suicide by jumping out of the window, although it is now commonly believed that he was murdered by the ascendant Communists.

In the 1946 Romanian elections, with the Red Army forces still occupying the country and exerting de facto control, Communists and their allied parties claimed 80% of the vote through a combination of vote manipulation, elimination and forced mergers of competing parties, establishing themselves as the dominant force. On December 30, 1947, King Michael I was forced by the Communists to abdicate and leave the country. Romania was then proclaimed a Communist state, under direct military and economic control of the USSR until 1958.

Beginning in February, 1947, the Communist-dominated Hungarian police, assisted by occupying Soviet forces, began arresting leaders of non-communist opposition parties. The Hungarian Workers Party (formed by a merger of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party) became the largest single party in the elections of 1947. The Communists gradually gained control of the government, and on August 18, 1949, the Parliament passed the new constitution of Hungary modelled after the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union, completing the transition to a Communist state allied with the Soviet Union.

Beginning on 24 June, 1948, the next major crisis of the Cold War exposed the rift in the Alliance of World War II which had defeated Germany, when Soviet troops blockaded access points to Berlin contrary to the Potsdam Agreement, which had permitted free access by the Western Allies to the zones of occupation of Berlin. This sparked the first Berlin Crisis, and the Berlin Airlift and lasted a year.

In the late summer of 1949, on 29 August, the Soviet atomic bomb project was revealed when a replica of the atomic bomb Fat Man was detonated by the U.S.S.R.; the Soviet Union had gained some of its nuclear technology by espionage from the United States. This development came several years ahead of American experts' view of when the Soviet Union could be expected to develop nuclear weapons, and set off immediate strategic and military concerns in the United States because the nuclear monopoly of the United States no longer existed.

Later that fall, on 1 October, 1949, Maoist forces were victorious over the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek, and a People's Republic was proclaimed for China, allied with the Soviet Union.

On 21 January, 1950, Alger Hiss, the General Secretary of the United Nations Charter meeting, was convicted of perjury for testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) regarding espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. That same month, physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed in Great Britain to espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the War.

On 25 June, 1950, the Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea, a confrontation that came with the potential for the use of nuclear weapons. Three weeks later, on 17 July, Julius Rosenberg was arrested on charges of espionage regarding the transfer of nuclear weapon technology to the Soviet Union while working at Fort Monmouth.

In May, 1951, two members of the Cambridge Five — Donald MacLean, Second Secretary of the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., and Guy Burgess — defected to Moscow after it was discovered MacLean transmitted information on the atom bomb from the British Embassy to the Soviet Union during World War II.

In this atmosphere, McCarthyism flourished.

Blacklists

The victims of McCarthyism were either denied employment in the private sector or failed government security checks. In the film industry alone, over 300 actors, writers and directors were denied work in the U.S. through the informal Hollywood blacklist.

People called by the House Un-American Activities Committee

David Bohm, physicist
Charlie Chaplin, actor
John Garfield, actor
Lillian Hellman, playwright and left-wing activist
John Hubley, animator
Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist
J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist, "father of the atomic bomb"
Paul Robeson, actor, athlete, singer, writer, political and civil rights activist, and winner of Stalin Peace Prize
Waldo Salt, writer, government employee & CPUSA member.

People called by the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee

Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist

Others

Aaron Copland, composer of modern tonal music
Dashiell Hammett, author
Alfred Kinsey, founder of the Institute for Sex Research, author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
Rev. David P. Smith, theologian
Paul Sweezy, economist and founder-editor of Monthly Review
Tsien Hsue-shen, physicist

Reactions

McCarthy's influence faltered in 1954. On March 9, 1954, famed CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow aired a highly critical "Report on Joseph R. McCarthy" that used footage of McCarthy himself to portray him as dishonest in his speeches and abusive toward witnesses. In April of the same year the Army-McCarthy Hearings began and were televised live on the new American Broadcasting Company. This allowed the public and press to view first-hand McCarthy's interrogation of individuals and his controversial tactics. In one exchange, McCarthy reminded the Army's attorney general, Joseph Welch that he had an employee in his law firm who had belonged to an organization that had been accused of Communist sympathies. Welch famously rebuked McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" This exchange reflected a growing negative public opinion of McCarthy.

The criticisms of McCarthyism and McCarthy in particular were three-fold:

That he was ruining the reputations and lives of many people by accusing them without credible evidence.
That he used accusations of Communist sympathies as a counter attack against anyone who criticized his methods.
That he argued against freedom of speech; much of his rhetoric assumed that any discussion of the ideas of Communism was a dangerous and un-American activity.

Continuing controversy

The release of the VENONA transcripts and material from Eastern bloc intelligence archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, added more material for the discussion of what had been going on during the 1950s. The Soviet records show that the general contention that Communist spies had infiltrated the federal government was true. The American Communist Party (CPUSA) had senior members in the pay of the Soviet Union. Communist spies included Julius Rosenberg and Theodore Hall, who gave nuclear secrets to the Soviets, and Harry Dexter White, who was the founding head of the International Monetary Fund. Other data have shown that Western anti-communists grossly overestimated the actual capacity of the Soviets to do harm through military and economic means—long believing, for example, that Soviet nuclear missile technology was vastly superior to that of the U.S., and also grossly overestimating other measures of Soviet strength such as annual GNP.

Many Americans responded to the cruder manifestations of the Red Scare by dismissing all claims by anti-communists concerning presumed communist infiltration in the United States. Though many of the more outré accusations of the McCarthy period—such as the claim that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist—now seem laughable, the debate over the Red Scare remains a significant theme in the culture wars between left-liberal and conservative factions in American politics. The guilt, innocence, and good or bad intentions of the icons of the Red Scare (McCarthy, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, Elia Kazan) are still discussed as proxies for the imputed virtues or vices of their successors and sympathizers. See historical revisionism.

Though the interpretation of the Red Scare might seem to be of only historical interest following the end of the Cold War, the political divisions it created in the United States continue to manifest themselves, and the politics and history of anti-communism in the United States are still contentious. One source of controversy is that illegal actions taken against the radical left during the Palmer and McCarthy periods are viewed as providing a historical template for similar actions against Muslims following the September 11th terrorist attacks, an analogy made explicit both by left-wing opponents of such actions (such as the American Civil Liberties Union) and right-wing proponents alike.

Critiques

From the viewpoint of some conservatives and McCarthy supporters at the time, the identification of foreign agents and the suppression of "radical organizations" was necessary. Senator McCarthy and his followers felt there was a dangerous subversive element that posed a danger to the security of the country, thereby justifying extreme measures—the embodiment of realpolitik.

The Arthur Miller play The Crucible, written during the McCarthy era, used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the McCarthyism of the 1950s, suggesting that the process of McCarthyism-style persecution can occur at any time or place. For example, those accused in McCarthy or HUAC hearings had little chance of exonerating themselves once their identities were revealed to the public. Simply being accused of Communist sympathies was sufficient to damage or end many careers. Similarly, those accused in The Crucible could not even argue their innocence; doing so would be undermining the court, a heresy during those strict theocratic times.

Contemporary use of the term

Since the time of McCarthy and the HUAC investigations, the term McCarthyism has entered American speech as a general term for the use of mass pressure, harassment, or blacklisting used to pressure people to follow popular political beliefs. The act of making insufficiently supported accusations or engaging in unbalanced investigations against a person as an attempt to silence or discredit them is often referred to as McCarthyism.

The term has since become synonymous with any perceived government activity that suppresses unfavorable political or social views, often by limiting or suspending civil rights under the pretext of maintaining national security.

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