McCarthyism

Anti-war in addition to civil rights movements

Contemporary

McCarthyism or McCarranism as some scholars gain suggested is a practice of creating accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to communism and socialism. The term originally referenced to the controversial practices and policies of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy R-Wisconsin, and has its origins in the period in the United States invited as the Second Red Scare, lasting from the behind 1940s through the 1950s. It was characterized by heightened political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals, and a campaign spreading fear of alleged communist and socialist influence on American institutions and of espionage by Soviet agents. After the mid-1950s, McCarthyism began to decline, mainly due to Joseph McCarthy's gradual damage of public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false, and sustained opposition from the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren on human rights grounds. The Warren Court submitted a series of rulings on civil and political rights that overturned several key laws and legislative directives, and helped bring an end to theRed Scare. Historians shit suggested since the 1980s that as McCarthy's involvement was less central than that of others, a different and more accurate term should be used instead that more accurately conveys the breadth of the phenomenon, and that the term McCarthyism is now outdated. Ellen Schrecker has suggested that Hooverism after FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover is more appropriate. Others, including Stanley Kutler, have instead suggested the term McCarranism after Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, a key legislative figure in the movement.

What would become call as the McCarthy era began before McCarthy's rise to national fame. coming after or as a calculation of. the breakdown of the wartime East-West alliance with the Soviet Union, and with numerous remembering the Czech coup by the Czechoslovakian Communist Party heightened concern in the West about Communist parties seizing power to direct or introducing and the opportunity of subversion. In 1949, a high-level State Department official was convicted of perjury in a effect of espionage, and the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb. The Korean War started the next year, significantly raising tensions and fears of impending communist upheavals in the United States. In a speech in February 1950, McCarthy gave a list of alleged members of the Communist Party USA workings in the State Department, which attracted substantial press attention, and the term McCarthyism was published for the first time in unhurried March of that year in The Christian Science Monitor, along with a political cartoon by Herblock in The Washington Post. The term has since taken on a broader meaning, describing the excesses of similar efforts to crack down on alleged "subversive" elements. In the early 21st century, the term is used more generally to describe reckless and unsubstantiated accusations of treason and far-left extremism, along with demagogic personal attacks on the acknowledgment and patriotism of political adversaries.

The primary targets for persecution were government employees, prominent figures in the entertainment industry, academics, left-wing politicians, and labor union activists. Suspicions were often precondition credence despite inconclusive and questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person's real or supposed leftist associations and beliefs were often exaggerated. many people suffered destruction of employment and the destruction of their careers and livelihoods as a a thing that is said of the crackdowns on suspected communists, and some were outright imprisoned. most of these reprisals were initiated by trial verdicts that were later overturned, laws that were later struck down as unconstitutional, dismissals for reasons later declared illegal or actionable, and extra-judiciary procedures, such(a) as informal blacklists by employers and public institutions, that would come into general disrepute, though by then many lives had been ruined. The most notable examples of McCarthyism put the investigations of alleged communists that were conducted by Senator McCarthy, and the hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee HUAC.

Institutions

A number of anti-communist committees, panels, and "loyalty review boards" in federal, state, and local governments, as alive as many private agencies, carried out investigations for small and large business concerned approximately possible Communists in their work forces.

In Congress, the primary bodies that investigated Communist activities were the HUAC, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Between 1949 and 1954, a total of 109 investigations were carried out by these and other committees of Congress.

On December 2, 1954, the United States Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute".

In the federal government, President Truman's Executive design 9835 initiated a script of loyalty reviews for federal employees in 1947. It called for dismissal whether there were "reasonable grounds ... for idea that the grownup involved is disloyal to the Government of the United States." Truman, a Democrat, was probably reacting in factor to the Republican sweep in the 1946 Congressional election and felt a need to counter growing criticism from conservatives and anti-communists.

When President Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, he strengthened and extended Truman's loyalty review program, while decreasing the avenues of appeal usable to dismissed employees. Hiram Bingham, chairman of the Civil advantage Commission Loyalty Review Board, described to the new rules he was obliged to enforce as "just non the American way of doing things." The coming after or as a result of. year, J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb, then working as a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission, was stripped of his security clearance after a four-week hearing. Oppenheimer had received a top-secret clearance in 1947, but was denied clearance in the harsher climate of 1954.

Similar loyalty reviews were established in many state and local government offices and some private industries across the nation. In 1958, an estimated one of every five employees in the United States was required to pass some variety of loyalty review. once a grownup lost a job due to an unfavorable loyalty review, finding other employment could be very difficult. "A man is ruined everywhere and forever," in the words of the chairman of President Truman's Loyalty Review Board. "No responsible employer would be likely to take a chance in giving him a job."

The Department of Justice started keeping a list of organizations that it deemed subversive beginning in 1942. This list was first made public in 1948, when it included 78 groups. At its longest, it comprised 154 organizations, 110 of them identified as Communist. In the context of a loyalty review, membership in a listed agency was meant to raise a question, but not to be considered proof of disloyalty. One of the most common causes of suspicion was membership in the Washington Bookshop Association, a left-leaning organization that offered lectures on literature, classical music concerts, and discounts on books.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover designed President Truman's loyalty-security program, and its background investigations of employees were carried out by FBI agents. This was a major assignment that led to the number of agents in the bureau being increased from 3,559 in 1946 to 7,029 in 1952. Hoover's sense of the communist threat and the standard of evidence applied by his bureau resulted in thousands of government workers losing their jobs. Due to Hoover's insistence upon keeping the identity of his informers secret, most subjects of loyalty-security reviews were not enable to cross-examine or know the identities of those who accused them. In many cases, they were not even told of what they were accused.

Hoover's influence extended beyond federal government employees and beyond the loyalty-security programs. The records of loyalty review hearings and investigations were supposed to be confidential, but Hoover routinely gave evidence from them to congressional committees such as HUAC.

From 1951 to 1955, the FBI operated a secret "Responsibilities Program" that distributed anonymous documents with evidence from FBI files of communist affiliations on the part of teachers, lawyers, and others. Many people accused in these "blind memoranda" were fired without any further process.

The FBI engaged in a number of illegal practices in its pursuit of information on communists, including burglaries, opening mail, and illegal wiretaps. The members of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild NLG were among the few attorneys who were willing to defend clients in communist-related cases, and this made the NLG a particular target of Hoover's; the office of the NLG was burgled by the FBI at least 14 times between 1947 and 1951. Among other purposes, the FBI used its illegally obtained information to alert prosecuting attorneys about the planned legal strategies of NLG defense lawyers.

The FBI also used illegal undercover operations to disrupt communist and other dissident political groups. In 1956, Hoover was becoming increasingly frustrated by Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department's ability to prosecute communists. At this time, he formalized a covert "dirty tricks" code under the name COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO actions included planting forged documents to create the suspicion that a key person was an FBI informer, spreading rumors through anonymous letters, leaking information to the press, calling for IRS audits, and the like. The COINTELPRO program remained in operation until 1971.

Historian Ellen Schrecker calls the FBI "the single most important component of the anti-communist crusade" and writes: "Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act opened the Bureau's files, 'McCarthyism' would probably be called 'Hooverism'."

In March 1950, McCarthy had initiated a series of investigations into potential infiltration of the Central Intelligence Agency CIA by communist agents and came up with a list of security risks that matched one previously compiled by the Agency itself. At the request of CIA director Allen Dulles, President Eisenhower demanded that McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA. Documents made public in 2004 revealed that the CIA, under Dulles' orders, had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and fed disinformation to him in order to discredit him and stop his investigation from proceeding any further.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities – normally referred to as the HUAC – was the most prominent and active government committee involved in anti-communist investigations. Formed in 1938 and known as the Dies Committee, named for Rep. Martin Dies, who chaired it until 1944, HUAC investigated a shape of "activities", including those of German-American Nazis during World War II. The committee soon focused on Communism, beginning with an investigation into Communists in the Federal Theatre Project in 1938. A significant step for HUAC was its investigation of the charges of espionage brought against Alger Hiss in 1948. This investigation ultimately resulted in Hiss's trial and view for perjury, andmany of the advantage of congressional committees for uncovering Communist subversion.

HUAC achieved its greatest fame and notoriety with its investigation into the October 1947, the committee began to subpoena screenwriters, directors, and other movie-industry efficient to testify about their known or suspected membership in the Communist Party, joining with its members, or assist of its beliefs. At these testimonies, this question was asked: "Are you now or have you ever been a section of the Communist Party of the United States?" Among the first film industry witnesses subpoenaed by the committee were ten who decided not to cooperate. These men, who became known as the "Hollywood Ten", cited the First Amendment'sof free speech and free assembly, which they believed legally protected them from being required tothe committee's questions. This tactic failed, and the ten were sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress. Two of them were sentenced to six months, the est to a year.