How is mccarthyism similar to the red scare

He was seldom in his Senate seat and his advice, seldom offered, was little heeded. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Bush Bill Clinton George W. Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center.

University of Virginia Miller Center. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Senator Joseph McCarthy In the early s, American leaders repeatedly told the public that they should be fearful of subversive Communist influence in their lives. Only a short-sighted or completely inexperienced individual would urge the use of the office of the presidency to give an opponent the publicity he so avidly desires.

Jackson, Eisenhower speechwriter, 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.

But McCarthyism outlasted McCarthy and the s. McCarthy made an almost unparalleled impact on Cold War American society. The tactics he perfected continued to be practiced long after his death. McCarthy had hardly alone. Congressman Richard Nixon, for instance, used his place on HUAC and his public role in the campaign against Alger Hiss to catapult himself into the White House alongside Eisenhower and later into the presidency.

Ronald Reagan bolstered the fame he had won in Hollywood with his testimony before Congress and his anti-communist work for major American corporations such as General Electric.

He too would use anti-communism to enter public life and chart a course to the presidency. In , radical anti-communists founded the John Birch Society, attacking liberals and civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr.

Although joined by Cold War liberals, the weight of anti-communism was used as part of an assault against the New Deal and its defenders. Even those liberals, such as historian Arthur Schlesinger, who had fought against communism found themselves smeared by the red scare. 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. When most of those employees were retained, the Dies Committee charged that CSC examiners themselves had subversive tendencies.

The Roosevelt administration and its supporters dismissed Dies and his ilk as fanatics, but in accusations that Communists had infiltrated government agencies began to get traction. The second Red Scare derived its momentum from fears that Communist spies in powerful government positions were manipulating U. Millions of federal employees filled out loyalty forms swearing they did not belong to any subversive organization and explaining any association they might have with a designated group.

Agency loyalty boards requested name checks and sometimes full field investigations by the FBI, which promptly hired 7, additional agents. Those numbers exclude job applicants who were rejected on loyalty grounds. More importantly, those numbers exclude the tens of thousands of civil servants who eventually were cleared after one or more rounds of investigation, which could include replying to written interrogatories, hearings, appeals, and months of waiting, sometimes without pay, for a decision.

Those grounds usually consisted of a list of individually minor associations that dated back to the s. Because loyalty standards became more restrictive over time, employees who did not change jobs too faced reinvestigation, even in the absence of new allegations against them. Loyalty standards tightened as the political terrain shifted. During the summer of , the ex-Communists Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers testified before HUAC that in the s and early s they had managed Washington spy rings that included dozens of government officials, including the former State Department aide Alger Hiss.

A Harvard Law School graduate who had been involved in the formation of the United Nations, Hiss vigorously denied the allegations, and Truman officials defended him. Hiss was convicted of perjury in Meanwhile, the Soviets developed nuclear capability sooner than expected, Communists took control in China, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted, and North Korea invaded South Korea.

Senator McCarthy claimed to explain those events by alleging that Communists had infiltrated the U. State Department. Congress then in effect broadened the loyalty program by passing Public Law , which empowered heads of sensitive agencies to dismiss an employee on security grounds.

An employee deemed loyal could nonetheless be labeled a security risk because of personal circumstances alcoholism, homosexuality, a Communist relative that were perceived to create vulnerability to coercion.

A purge of homosexuals from the State Department and other agencies ensued. That same month the U. It was not unusual for a career civil servant to be investigated under the Hatch Act during World War II and then again after each executive order. Of the more than 9, employees who were cleared after full investigation under the standard, for example, at least 2, saw their cases reopened under the standard. Employees who had been cleared never knew when their case might be reopened.

Even after the loyalty program was curbed in the late s, the FBI continued to keep tabs on former loyalty defendants. Unlike dismissals, investigations occurred across the ranks, so all civil servants felt the pressure. Case files declassified in the early 21st century indicate that loyalty investigations truncated or redirected the careers of many high-ranking civil servants, who typically kept secret the fact that they had been investigated.

Many of them were noncommunist but left-leaning New Dealers who advocated measures designed to expand democracy by regulating the economy and reducing social inequalities. Their fields of expertise included labor and civil rights, consumer protection, welfare, national health insurance, public power, and public housing; their marginalization by charges of disloyalty impeded reform in these areas and narrowed the scope of political discourse more generally.

Through the federal loyalty program, conservative anticommunists exploited public fears of espionage to block policy initiatives that impinged on private-sector prerogatives. The loyalty program for federal employees was accompanied by similar programs focused on port security and industrial security. Private employees on government contracts also faced screening, and state and local governments soon imitated the federal programs.

Public universities revived mandatory loyalty oaths. In , Americans employed by international organizations such as the United Nations became subject to Civil Service Commission loyalty screening, over protests that such screening violated the sovereignty of the international organizations.

One researcher estimated in that approximately 20 percent of the U. Beyond the realms of government, industry, and transport, anticommunists trained their sights on those arenas where they deemed the potential for ideological subversion to be high, including education and the media.

The entertainment industry was an especially attractive target for congressional investigating committees seeking to generate sensational headlines. Eventually, after the Supreme Court refused to hear their case, the ten directors and screenwriters spent six months in prison. For more than a decade beyond that, they were blacklisted by Hollywood employers.

As countersubversives issued a steady flow of accusations, the cloud of suspicion expanded. It listed writers, composers, producers, and performers and included a long list of allegedly subversive associations for each person.

The booklet was riddled with factual errors. On March 21, , President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order , also known as the Loyalty Order , which mandated that all federal employees be analyzed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government. Yet it was only one of many questionable activities that occurred during the period of anticommunist hysteria known as the Red Scare. One of the pioneering efforts to investigate communist activities took place in the U.

Under pressure from the negative publicity aimed at their studios, movie executives created Hollywood blacklists that barred suspected radicals from employment; similar lists were also established in other industries. Another congressional investigator, U. McCarthy of Wisconsin , became the person most closely associated with the anticommunist crusade—and with its excesses. McCarthy used hearsay and intimidation to establish himself as a powerful and feared figure in American politics. He leveled charges of disloyalty at celebrities, intellectuals and anyone who disagreed with his political views, costing many of his victims their reputations and jobs.

Edgar Hoover , aided many of the legislative investigations of communist activities. An ardent anticommunist, Hoover had been a key player in an earlier, though less pervasive, Red Scare in the years following World War I The information obtained by the FBI proved essential in high-profile legal cases, including the conviction of 12 prominent leaders of the American Communist Party on charges that they had advocated the overthrow of the government. The Rosenbergs were executed two years later.

Public concerns about communism were heightened by international events. In , the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear bomb and communist forces led by Mao Zedong took control of China.

The following year saw the start of the Korean War , which engaged U. The advances of communism around the world convinced many U. Figures such as McCarthy and Hoover fanned the flames of fear by wildly exaggerating that possibility.