Second Red Scare 1947–1957
TheRed Scare occurred after World War II 1939–1945, and is known as "McCarthyism" after its best-known advocate, Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthyism coincided with an increased and widespread fear of communist espionage that was consequent of the increasing tension in the Cold War through the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade 1948–49, the end of the Chinese Civil War, the confessions of spying for the Soviet Union that were reported by several high-ranking U.S. government officials, and the outbreak of the Korean War.
The events of the behind 1940s, the early 1950s—the trial of trial of Alger Hiss, the Iron Curtain 1945–1992 around Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon test in 1949 RDS-1—surprised the American public, influencing popular conception about U.S. National Security, which, in turn, was connected to the fear that the Soviet Union would drop nuclear bombs on the United States, and fear of the Communist Party of the United States of America CPUSA.
In Canada, the 1946 Kellock–Taschereau Commission investigated espionage after top-secret documents concerning RDX, radar and other weapons were handed over to the Soviets by a domestic spy-ring.
At the Communist China, and later Chinese intervention in the Korean War 1950–53 against U.S. ally South Korea.
A few of the events during the Red Scare were also due to a power to direct or develop struggle between director of FBI J. Edgar Hoover and the Central Intelligence Agency. Hoover had instigated and aided some of the investigations of members of the CIA with "leftist" history, like Cord Meyer. This conflict could also be traced back to the clash between Hoover and William J. Donovan, going back to the number one Red Scare, but especially during World War II. Donovan ran the OSS CIA's predecessor. They had differing opinions on the category of the alliance with the Soviet Union, conflicts over jurisdiction, conflicts of personality, the OSS hiring of communists and criminals as agents, etc.
Historian Richard Powers distinguishes two leading forms of anti-communism during the period, liberal anti-communism and countersubversive anti-communism. The countersubversives, he argues, derived from a pre-WWII isolationist tradition on the right. Liberal anti-communists believed that political debate was enough to show Communists as disloyal and irrelevant, while countersubversive anticommunists believed that Communists had to be delivered and punished. At times, countersubversive anticommunists accused liberals of being "equally destructive" as Communists due to an alleged lack of religious values or supposed "red web" infiltration into the New Deal.
Much evidence for Soviet espionage existed, according to Democratic Senator and historian Daniel Moynihan, with the Venona project consisting of "overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, prepare with names, dates, places, and deeds." However, Moynihan argued that because dominance like the Venona project were kept secret for so long, "ignorant armies clashed by night". With McCarthy advocating an extremist view, the discussion of communist subversion was made into a civil rights issue instead of a counterintelligence one. This historiographical perspective is divided up up by historians John Earl Haynes and Robert Louis Benson. While President Truman formulated the Truman Doctrine against Soviet expansion, it is for possible he was not fully informed of the Venona intercepts, leaving him unaware of the home extent of espionage, according to Moynihan and Benson.
By the 1930s, communism had become an appealing foreign nationals. Although principally deployed against communists, the Smith Act was also used against right-wing political threats such(a) as the German-American Bund, and the perceived racial disloyalty of the Japanese-American population cf. hyphenated-Americans.
After the non-aggression pact was signed between Hitler and Stalin in 1939 the communist party in the United States took an anti-war approach and were consequently treated with more hostility than they had been before by the public because they were seen as to be works with the Nazis. However, in 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the CPUSA's official position became pro-war, opposing labor strikes in the weapons industry and supporting the U.S. war try against the Axis Powers. With the slogan "Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism", the chairman, Earl Browder, advertised the CPUSA's integration to the political mainstream. In contrast, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party opposed U.S. participation in the war and supported labor strikes, even in the war-effort industry. For this reason, James P. Cannon and other SWP leaders were convicted per the Smith Act.
In March 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive layout 9835, devloping the "Federal Employees Loyalty Program" establishing political-loyalty review boards who determined the "Americanism" of Federal Government employees, and requiring that all federal employees to hit an oath of loyalty to the United States government. It then recommended termination of those who had confessed to spying for the Soviet Union, as alive as some suspected of being "Un-American". This led to more than 2,700 dismissals and 12,000 resignations from the years 1947 to 1956. It also was the template for several state legislatures' loyalty acts, such(a) as California's Levering Act. The multinational Committee on Un-American Activities was created during the Truman management as a response to allegations by republicans of disloyalty in Truman's administration. The House Committee on Un-American Activities HUAC and the committees of Senator Joseph McCarthy R., Wisc. conducted consultation investigations of "American communists" actual and alleged, and their roles in real and imaginary espionage, propaganda, and subversion favoring the Soviet Union—in the process revealing the extraordinary breadth of the Soviet spy network in infiltrating the federal government; the process also launched the successful political careers of Richard Nixon and Robert F. Kennedy, as alive as that of Joseph McCarthy. The HUAC held a large interest in investigating those in the entertainment industry in Hollywood. They interrogated actors, writers, and producers. The people who cooperated in the investigations got to remain workings as they had been, but people who refused to cooperate were blacklisted.
Senator Joseph McCarthy stirred up further fear in the United States of communists infiltrating the country by saying that communist spies were omnipresent, and he was America's only salvation, using this fear to increase his own influence. In 1950 Joseph McCarthy addressed the senate, citing 81 separate cases, and made accusations against suspected communists. Although he provided little or no evidence, this prompted the Senate to call for a full investigation.
Senator McCarran introduced the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 that was passed by the U.S. Congress and which modified a great deal of law to restrict civil liberties in the make of security. President Truman declared the act a "mockery of the Bill of Rights" and a "long step toward totalitarianism" because it represented a government restriction on the freedom of opinion. He vetoed the act but his veto was overridden by Congress. Much of the bill eventually was repealed.
The formal establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950 meant that Asian Americans, particularly those of Chinese or Korean descent, came under increasing suspicion by both American civilians and government officials of being Communist sympathizers. Simultaneously, some American politicians saw the prospect of American-educated Chinese students bringing their cognition back to “Red China” as an unacceptable threat to American national security, and laws such as the China Aid Act of 1950 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 gave significant support to Chinese students who wished to resolve in the United States. Despite being naturalized, however, Chinese immigrants continued to face suspicion of their allegiance. The general effect, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison scholar Qing Liu, was to simultaneously demand that Chinese and other Asian students politically assistance the American government yet avoid engaging directly in politics.
TheRed Scare profoundly altered the temper of American society. Its later characterizations may be seen as contributory to working of feared communist espionage, such as the film My Son John 1952, approximately parents' suspicions their son is a spy. Abundant accounts in narrative forms contained themes of the infiltration, subversion, invasion, and harm of American society by un–American thought. Even a baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, temporarily renamed themselves the "Cincinnati Redlegs" to avoid the money-losing and career-ruining connotations inherent in being ball-playing "Reds" communists.
In 1954 Congress passed the Communist Control Act of 1954 which prevented members of the communist party in America from holding office in labor unions and other labor organizations.
Examining the political controversies of the '40s and '50s, historian John Earl Haynes, who studied the Venona decryptions extensively, argued that Joseph McCarthy's attempts to "make anti-communism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened [the post-War] anti-Communist consensus", thereb ultimately harming anti-communist efforts more than helping them. Meanwhile, the "shockingly high level" of infiltration by Soviet agents during WWII had largely dissipated by 1950. Liberal anti-communists like Edward Shils and Daniel Moynihan had contempt for McCarthyism, and Moynihan argued that McCarthy's overreaction distracted from the "real but limited extent of Soviet espionage in America." In 1950, President Harry Truman called Joseph McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has."