what did the us do to combat communism

In 1950, fewer than 50,000 Americans out of a full US population of 150 meg were members of the Communist Party. Withal in the late 1940s and early on 1950s, American fears of internal communist subversion reached a nearly hysterical pitch. Government loyalty boards investigated millions of federal employees, asking what books and magazines they read, what unions and civic organizations they belonged to, and whether they went to church. Hundreds of screenwriters, actors, and directors were blacklisted because of their alleged political beliefs, while teachers, steelworkers, sailors, lawyers, and social workers lost their jobs for like reasons. More than thirty-ix states required teachers and other public employees to take loyalty oaths. Meanwhile, some libraries pulled books that were considered also leftist from their shelves. The banned volumes included such classics asRobin Hood, Henry David Thoreau'sCeremonious Defiance, and John Steinbeck'southwardThe Grapes of Wrath.

The postwar Red Scare is frequently called "McCarthyism," a name derived from one of the era's most notorious anti-Communists, Senator Joseph McCarthy. All the same the anti-Communist crusade of the tardily 1940s and 1950s extended both in time and scope well beyond the activities of the junior senator from Wisconsin. Its roots can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century. As far back every bit 1848, when Karl Marx published theCommunist Manifesto, many Americans viewed communism every bit an conflicting credo. The Bolshevik Revolution only added to such anxieties, fueling an earlier Scarlet Scare in 1919.

Postwar anti-Communism was rooted even more directly in the political culture of the 1930s. During the Low, many Americans became disillusioned with capitalism and some establish communist ideology appealing. Others were attracted by the visible activism of American Communists on behalf of a wide range of social and economic causes, including the rights of African Americans, workers, and the unemployed. Still others, alarmed past the rising of the Nationalists in Spain and the Nazis in Germany, admired the Soviet Union'due south early on and staunch opposition to fascism. (This opposition ended abruptly, if temporarily, with the annunciation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in late Baronial 1939.) In 1935, Joseph Stalin announced that he would let Communists around the world to marry with liberals and non-communist leftists in a broad anti-fascist coalition. All of these developments swelled the membership of the US Communist Political party from some 7,500 at the start of the decade to an estimated 55,000 by its end. More importantly, many Americans who did non join the party sympathized with what they saw equally its goals. They joined dozens of other groups with tangential connections to the Communists: unions, theatrical troupes, lawyer'due south guilds, ethnic organizations, and political committees devoted to causes ranging from anti-fascism to civil rights. Many victims of the postwar Red Scare were hounded for activities they had engaged in a decade or more before.

If the Depression decade boosted the profile of international communism in the United States, it also sparked an anti-Communist backlash. Some of those who warned of a growing "cherry menace" during the 1930s feared Soviet influence in the US, but near hoped to use anti-communist linguistic communication to discredit labor and social activism and New Deal policies. Ironically, anti-Communists were sometimes aided by liberals and leftists whose primary fear was fascist subversion. In any case, about all of the tactics deployed by anti-Communists in the decade later on World War II had a trial run in the late 1930s. This flow saw the renewal of FBI spying, the adoption of loyalty oaths for teachers and a political litmus examination for federal employees, and passage of the starting time peacetime sedition law since 1798. In 1938, anti-Communists and anti-fascists in Congress joined forces to create the Firm Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which would become one of the key institutional centers of postwar anti-Communism.

Hitler'south surprise invasion of the Soviet Marriage in June 1941 turned Washington and Moscow into wartime allies, and for a time domestic anti-Communism waned. But as the war ended and the alliance frayed, a series of events fanned the banked embers of anti-Communism into flames. In the bound of 1945, acting on orders from Moscow, Us Communists reversed their policy of reconciliation with the West and adopted a militantly anti-capitalist stance. Meanwhile, authorities in the Usa and Canada uncovered evidence of Soviet espionage, bear witness that suggested Americans had been involved in passing classified secrets. Finally, Republicans and some bourgeois Democrats saw in anti-Communism a powerful entrada effect and a weapon that could exist used to adjourn union and ceremonious rights activism and New Bargain policies. During the 1946 mid-term elections, for instance, Senator Robert Taft defendant President Truman of seeking a Congress "dominated by a policy of appeasing the Russians abroad and of fostering communism at home."

To fend off such attacks from the right—and to build domestic support for his Common cold War foreign policy—President Truman in March 1947 issued an executive order creating a Federal Loyalty-Security Program. A greatly enlarged version of a program originally instituted in 1939, the programme gave loyalty review boards the power to fire federal employees when "reasonable grounds" existed for belief that they were disloyal. Bear witness of disloyalty included not only treasonous activities, but "sympathetic association" with a long list of organizations deemed by the Chaser Full general to be "Communist, fascist, or totalitarian." These organizations ranged from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to the National Negro Congress. In practice, people could lose their jobs for existence on the incorrect mailing list, owning suspect books or phonograph records, or associating with relatives or friends who were politically suspect. Those accused almost never learned the source of the allegations against them, and the criteria for dismissal were expanded in 1951 and over again in 1953. Tens of thousands of federal employees—including asymmetric numbers of civil rights activists and gays—were fully investigated under the loyalty-security program, and some 2700 were dismissed between 1947 and 1956. Thousands more resigned "voluntarily" earlier the plan'south demise in the early 1960s. Past legitimizing the use of political litmus tests for employment, the federal loyalty-security programme paved the way for the use of like political tests by state and local governments and private employers. Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, school systems, universities, picture show studios, social welfare agencies, ports, companies with defence contracts, and many other employers used background checks, loyalty oaths, and other ways to weed out employees accounted politically undesirable.

If 1947 marked the start of the Federal Loyalty-Security program, it also saw the resuscitation of HUAC. In October of that twelvemonth, the committee was catapulted back into the headlines later on years in obscurity when it launched an investigation of communist influences in the picture show manufacture. HUAC summoned a dazzling array of actors, screenwriters, and directors to testify at public hearings, asking them about their own involvement with the party and pressing them to proper noun others with Communist ties. Ten witnesses—including the famous director Edward Dmytryk and Oscar-winning screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner, Jr.—refused to cooperate on the grounds that answering the committee's questions would legitimize inquiry into political beliefs and associations. The "Hollywood Ten" were convicted for contempt of Congress and served short prison terms. HUAC's investigation led to the development of extensive amusement industry "blacklists," which made it difficult or incommunicable for those suspected of leftist sympathies to discover work. These blacklists persisted into the early on 1960s. Meanwhile, HUAC went on the road, holding hearings in cities beyond the US over the form of the side by side decade and investigating teachers, musicians, union organizers, and other groups. HUAC also inspired others. By the 1950s, two Senate subcommittees and dozens of committees at the state and local levels were also investigating "un-American activities."

The Ruby Scare was well underway by the cease of 1947, but a series of events in late 1949 and 1950 fed the anti-communist frenzy. In September 1949 Americans learned that the Soviet Matrimony had successfully tested an diminutive bomb, years earlier than most experts had thought possible. In December, Mao's Communist army captured mainland Mainland china, prompting headlines well-nigh the "loss" of Mainland china. In June 1950, Democratic people's republic of korea invaded Southward Korea, and the resulting Korean State of war soon devolved into a prolonged stalemate. Many Americans thought that merely a fifth column working to undermine the US from within could explain this series of setbacks.

Such fears were reinforced by several loftier-profile spy cases. In 1949, Alger Hiss, a former Country Department official, was accused of passing secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1930s; the statute of limitations for treason had run out, only a jury convicted Hiss of perjury. The following twelvemonth, Britain revealed that a high-ranking physicist named Klaus Fuchs had spied for the Soviets while working on the Manhattan Project. Finally, in 1951 a federal judge found Julius and Ethel Rosenberg guilty of passing atomic secrets to Soviet agents, and both were eventually sent to the electrical chair. Hiss and the Rosenbergs maintained their innocence and their cases became cause célèbres for many liberals. Evidence obtained since the collapse of the Soviet Union has strengthened the case against Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, while suggesting that Ethel's participation was minimal. Still, scholars continue to debate the guilt of all three.

One of those who took advantage of the rising hysteria was a young senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy. Seizing an opportunity to improve his political fortune, McCarthy gave a spoken communication to the Women's Republican Lodge of Wheeling, West Virginia, in Feb 1950 in which he claimed to hold in his hand a list of 205 Communists in the Land Department. (In later on versions of the speech, he changed the number to 81 and and then 57.) The very concreteness of this charge—and the many others McCarthy hurled over the adjacent few years—set the Wisconsin senator autonomously from other red baiters and he quickly captured headlines. McCarthy cared little about the accuracy of his accusations, and he fabricated heavy employ of intimidation and allusion. Nevertheless, his complete disregard for the truth only made him more powerful and frightening. Few dared to challenge McCarthy direct, and many Republicans who despised him found him useful. (President Eisenhower told aides that he would not "get into the gutter with that guy.") Later on Republicans won command of Congress in 1952, McCarthy took over a Senate subcommittee and he used this perch to investigate federal agencies like Voice of America and the Army Indicate Corps.

McCarthy, like members of HUAC and many other red baiters, profoundly exaggerated the domestic communist threat. Nonetheless, the party's policy of secrecy, its top-downwards control, its attempt to win converts, and its ties to the Soviet Union alarmed even many liberals. "Cold War liberals" similar Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, union leader Walter Reuther, and historian and presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. deplored the excesses of anti-Communism, but agreed with many of its basic tenets. Such liberals generally supported New Deal policies and an array of social reforms, but besides believed that the all-time mode to protect the nation from both Communists and anti-Communist zealots was to purge schools, unions, reform groups, and professional organizations of those with ties to the party. Thus, while their language was more restrained than that of McCarthy and others they decried, Cold State of war liberals frequently supported some anti-Communist sanctions.

Anti-Communism continued into the 1960s, but after 1954 information technology lost much of its fevered pitch. The turning point came when Senator McCarthy began to investigate Communists in the Regular army, and powerful Republicans (including the President) decided he had finally gone besides far. A special Senate subcommittee was formed to investigate McCarthy'due south tactics and ABC circulate the hearings live, the first time political hearings had been televised nationally. The Army-McCarthy hearings dominated national tv set for three months and exposed McCarthy's bullying tactics. Much of the credit for this goes to Joseph Welch, the feisty and folksy Boston lawyer hired by the Army. When McCarthy ruby-baited one of Welch'due south young associates, Welch responded: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I had never actually gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. . . . Have yous no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The question resonated with Americans. A few months later the Senate voted overwhelmingly to censure McCarthy and his influence evaporated. The worst of the Red Scare was over.

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Wendy Wall is an acquaintance professor of history at Binghamton University and the writer of Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Ceremonious Rights Move (2007).

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Source: https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/fifties/essays/anti-communism-1950s

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