Reference
- McCarthyismThe term McCarthyism is generally used to refer to a specific period in American history during which an ever present system of political repression reached its apogee. This specific period, the decade of the 1950s, was actually much broader than is usually understood in terms of anticommunist hysteria. Many of the mechanisms to ferret out and punish alleged communists or subversives had been in place since at least the 1930s. The infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had been created in 1938 under the leadership of Texas congressman Martin Dies and had given rise to a young anticommunist attorney named Richard M. Nixon. By 1950, then, many elected officials had garnered substantial political capital based largely on this issue. On February 9, 1950, however, an obscure senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, delivered a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that assured his legacy as perhaps the leading exponent of America's second Red Scare.
- Red ScareCampaign against communists (called ‘reds’) in the USA during the 20th century, and associated atmosphere of suspicion and fear. The first major Red Scare took place in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, and coincided with a period of US labour disorders, most notably by the Industrial Workers of the World. The second took place during the Cold War in the late 1940s and 1950s, and led to the political persecution known as McCarthyism. Thousands of people were arrested on suspicion, careers were ruined, and communists were banned from entry to the USA...
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Streaming Media
- The Korean War and McCarthyismEspionage cases in the late 1940s heightened fears of Communism. The Truman administration began to investigate the loyalty of federal employees. Many businesses, including the Hollywood film industry, conducted anti-Communist purges. Anti-Communist fears allowed Senator Joseph McCarthy to exploit irrational public fears. Post-war Korea and Berlin remained potential flash-points.
- Paul Robeson: "I'm a Negro. I'm an American."A cinematic homage to the African American singer, actor, civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1898–1976). At the peak of his singing career in the late 1940s, Robeson began to work primarily as a political activist and subsequently had to endure years of discrimination and isolation in his own country during the hysteria of 1950s McCarthyism.
- Sound Smart: The Red ScareHistorian Yohuru Williams explains how the fear of communist influences in America grew into a phenomenon known as "the Red Scare".
Perspectives
Ike and Mccarthy
Revealed for the first time, this is the full story of how President Dwight Eisenhower masterminded the downfall of the anti-Communist demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. Behind the scenes, Eisenhower loathed McCarthy, the powerful Republican senator notorious for his anti-Communist witch hunt. In spite of a public perception that Eisenhower was unwilling to challenge McCarthy, Ike believed that directly confronting the senator would diminish the presidency. Therefore, the president operated with a "hidden hand," refusing even to mention the Senator's name. In Ike and McCarthy, David A Nichols shows how the tension between the two men escalated. In a direct challenge to Eisenhower, McCarthy alleged that the US Army was harboring communists and launched an investigation. But the senator had unwittingly signed his own political death warrant. The White House employed surrogates to conduct a clandestine campaign against McCarthy and was not above using information about the private lives of McCarthy's aides as ammunition. In January 1954 McCarthy was arguably the most powerful member of the Senate. By the end of that year, he had been censured by his colleagues for unbecoming conduct. Eisenhower's covert operation had discredited the senator months earlier, exploiting the controversy that resulted from the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy would never recover his lost prestige. Nichols uses documents previously unavailable or overlooked to authenticate the extraordinary story of Eisenhower's anti-McCarthy campaign. Ike and McCarthy is an eye-opening, newsworthy, and fascinating read.
A Conspiracy So Immense
Acclaimed historian David Oshinsky's chronicling of the life of Senator Joe McCarthy has been called both "nuanced" and "masterful." In this new paperback edition Oshinsky presents us with a work heralded as the finest account available of Joe McCarthy's colorful career. With a storyteller's eye for the dramatic and presentation of fact, and insightful interpretation of human complexity, Oshinsky uncovers the layers of myth to show the true McCarthy. His book reveals the senator from his humble beginnings as a hardworking Irish farmer's son in Wisconsin to his glory days as the architect of America's Cold War crusade against domestic subversion; a man whose advice if heeded, some believe, might have halted the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia and beyond.
McCarthyism and the Red Scare
This book is a must-read for anyone studying and researching the rise and fall of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and McCarthyism in American political life. * Provides an overview of McCarthyism and the postwar Red Scare, relating these mindsets to other waves of domestic persecution * Includes 12 relevant historic documents such as the Truman Loyalty Oaths; a transcript of McCarthy's speech in Wheeling, West Virginia; McCarthy's attacks on Acheson and Marshall; Margaret Chase Smith's Statement on Conscience; and the Senate's censure of McCarthy * Provides information on the First Red Scare and the emergence of the American fear of the Left and the potential for a revolution * Includes 11 short biographies of primary individuals associated with McCarthyism and the Red Scare * Presents a chronology of events that threatened or weakened individual rights throughout the 20th century, with a specific focus on the Red Scare periods of 1919-21 and 1945-57 * An annotated bibliography includes primary and secondary sources representing the most significant contemporary and scholarly works on the topic
Point of Order
A compilation of TV coverage of the 1954 McCarthy-Army hearings, where the Army accuses Senator McCarthy of improperly pressuring the Army for special treatment of one of the senator's aides.
No Sense of Decency
"Have you no sense of decency, sir?" asked attorney Robert Welch in a climactic moment in the 1954 Senate hearings that pitted Joseph R. McCarthy against the United States Army, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the rest of the political establishment. What made the confrontation unprecedented and magnified its impact was its gavel-to-gavel coverage by television. Thirty-six days of hearings transfixed the nation. With a journalist's eye for revealing detail, Robert Shogan traces the phenomenon and analyzes television's impact on government. Despite McCarthy's fall, Mr. Shogan points out, the hearings left a major item of unfinished business--the issue of McCarthyism, the strategy based on fear, smear, and guilt by association.
Honorable Survivor: Mao's China, McCarthy's America, and the persecution of John S. Service
Honorable Survivor weaves John S. Service's extraordinary story into the fabric of a watershed moment in our history when World War II was ending, the Cold War was dawning, and the McCarthy era witch-hunters were stirring. The book reveals how people, policy, and politics mix to create the circumstances of our lives--and the experiences of one man who came to be at the center of a series of extraordinary events involving the fate of nations. A true story of intrigue, adventure, persecution, and redemption- and the love of a loyal American wife and a Chinese lover, this biography chronicles the experiences of John S. Service. Emmy award-winning journalist Lynne Joiner tells the tale of Service, an idealistic U.S. Foreign Service officer in wartime China who had the misfortune of often being right although U.S. policymakers refused to heed his prescient reporting. He predicted Mao Tse-tung's successful revolution long before anyone else even knew the Chinese Communists were a potent force, and, subsequently, he became Sen. Joseph McCarthy's first victim. The author describes how Service was fired for "doubtful" loyalty--but won his job back in the U.S. Supreme Court, only to have his career "neutralized" by the FBI, anti-Communist politicians, the China lobby, and Chiang Kai-shek's secret police. Born and raised in China by YMCA missionaries, Service became America's key liaison with the Communist Chinese when Gen. Joseph Stilwell wanted their help against the Japanese. Later, he became a target of revenge for Nationalist Chinese, a convenient scapegoat for American politicians eager to advance their careers, and a "person of interest" to J. Edgar Hoover for more than a quarter century. Joiner was given special access to Service's private papers and photographs with Mao and Chou En-lai, among others, and gained access to FBI, CIA, and State Department security records as well as confidential transcripts of congressional hearings and federal loyalty review boards. Although newly released Soviet and U.S. documents demonstrate that some of his wartime associates were in fact identified as Communist spies or fellow travelers, Joiner shows that Service was an honorable survivor who was innocent of McCarthy's charges.
Political Cartoons
- Pointing Their Pens: Herblock and Fellow Cartoonists Confront the Issues: Red ScareIn the 1950s the nation feared the increase in communist-run countries after World War II. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s four-year public smear campaign began in 1950 and paralleled the intimidation tactics already underway by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been founded in 1938 to root out subversive activities related to communism.