The McCarthy Hearings
Senator Joseph McCarthy instilled fear into the minds of the Americans with his anti-
Communist thinking, with his ideals. Senator McCarthy, during 1950-1954, disrupted the United
States with the HUAC ( House of Un-American Activity Committee) Hearings. These hearings brought government workers, college professors, playwrights and Hollywood screen writers, actors, artists, musicians, gays, Jews and anyone with a goatee under suspicion.
Joseph McCarthy was an unknown senator from Wisconsin, who wanted to be in the spotlight. During a speech in West Virginia, Senator McCarthy accused the State Department of being full of Communists. The media immediately centered on McCarthy and his accusations. A
Senate committee was immediately appointed to look at these accusations. The United States was already in the middle of a Communist witch-hunt. It was believed that the recipe for the atomic bomb was stolen by an American communist. With the Communist take over in Russia with Stalin and in China with Mao Tse Tung, the United States was already on the road to being conservative. The Republican Party had control of the Congress. President Truman restarted the
HUAC to stop the fears of the American people .
Investigations were started to look for Communist activities in organized labor, the
Federal government, and especially Hollywood. Hollywood was hit the har...
I am reading Bomb by Steve Sheinkin. At the beginning of the book, Oppenheimer, who is the main chemical scientist in the novel, sees the effects of the Great Depression on his pupils when they cannot buy chemistry textbooks. During Oppenheimer’s time as a professor, the Nazis discovered the splitting of the uranium atom. When Albert Einstein found out that about the discovery the Nazis did, he informs President Roosevelt about how the Nazis plan to develop atomic weapons. Harry Gold who is a Communist spy, starts to work with the KGB. And starts to steal ideas and projects from the American Uranium Committee.
A young scientist who was very smart and intelligent was the creator of a bomb that killed millions. The bomb was the most powerful weapon that was ever manufactured. He changed the course of World War II. This man is Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atomic bomb. The book “Bomb” by Steve Sheinkin, is a book that includes teamwork and how Americans made a deadly bomb that changed the course of the war. The book engages the reader through how spies share secret information with enemies. Because the physicists were specifically told not to share any information, they were not justified in supplying the Soviet Union with the bomb technology.
Imagine working with radioactive materials in a secret camp, and the government not telling you that this material is harmful to your body. In the book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown, she takes her readers on a journey to expose what happened in the first two cities that started producing plutonium. Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has won a handful of prizes, such as the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History, and was also a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Brown wrote this book by looking through hundreds of archives and interviews with people, the evidence she found brought light to how this important history of the Cold War left a nuclear imprint on the world today.
Throughout history , it has been shown that, history has a tendency to repeat itself. In 1692, men and women were accused of witchcraft whether they were guilty or not. The place that this was occurring was, Salem, Massachusetts, a city full of puritans who came from Europe. Witchcraft was the among the worst crime any individual could do. This often times led to people being hung or exiled from the church. Many people were hung, even though they were innocent. Many years later during the WWII era, there was a lot of speculation about communists and their impact in America This era was known as the McCarthyism era, because, Sen. McCarthy was the leading America into a anti -communist state. In one case in particular was of a U.S AIr Force Lieutenant, Milo Radulovich, who was released from the Air Force due to the fact that his father, read a newspaper which was from Serbia, because he has a Serbian background, the Air Force believed his was pro-communism, since the newspaper favored communism. The Air Force also believed Milo was pro-communism because, his sister peacefully protested outside of a hotel which didn’t allow a communist member to stay at . Milo was born and raised in Michigan, he also dedicatedly served his country, he had no form of favor in communism. but was automatically placed under the notion that he supported communism and was fighting for them because his dad read a newspaper from a different country and his sister protested for equal rights. Neither Milo or his family did anything bad. Assumption thinking leads to stereotypes.
On August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On August 15th, the Japan announced unconditional surrender in World War II. To this day historians still discuss why the U.S. decided to use the atomic bombs. Orthodox historians argue that the decision to drop the bombs was a military one designed purely to defeat the Japanese. Revisionist historians argue that the bombs were not needed to defeat Japan; the bombs were meant to shape the peace by intimidating the Soviets. After analyzing the documents in The Manhattan Project it has become clear that the U.S. used the bombs during WWII not only to defeat the Japanese, but also to intimidate the Soviet Union
"The truth is bad enough--but nowhere near as bad as you probably think. The truth will do away with a lot of silly ideas, a lot of completely wrong notions, which millions of people now believe about the atomic bomb. These ideas could easily cause great panic. And right now the possibility of panic is one of the best weapons any enemy could use against us." (Gerstell, How to Survive an Atomic Bomb 1)
Despite all of the security used by the officials in charge of the “Manhattan Project,” soviet spies managed to leak information to the Soviet Union that allowed them to create a nuclear bomb of their own. Klaus Fuchs, an important scientist to the “Manhattan Project,” managed to move throughout the project and provide crucial information to the Soviets. David Greenglass also provi...
It all started with the “Hungarian conspiracy” it had everyone convinced that the creation of a nuclear bomb possible, but that the German government was already doing research in this field of study and on such a weapon. To the rest of the world, the thought of Adolf Hitler might be the first to gain control of a weapon this destructiveness would be terrifying to the United States. Right, then they decided that the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt must be warned about the dangers and that the United States must begin its research department.As the planned gave way, Einstein was to write a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the possibilities and dangers of the atomic weapons, and later was taken to the president.Einsteins appointment was easy to get in te late summer of 1939. Hitler had just invaded Poland .and the war had just begun in Europe.After speaking with the President, he gathered his cabinet. and wanted to speak with his chief aide, after talking with him a small committee was set up called ...
FOR ALMOST fifty years, the words "McCarthy" and "McCarthyism" have stood for a shameful period in American political history. During this period, thousands of people lost their jobs and hundreds were sent to prison. The U.S. government executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two Communist Party (CP) members, as Russian spies. All of these people were victims of McCarthyism, the witch-hunt during the 1940s and 1950s against Communists and other leftists, trade unionists and civil rights activists, intellectuals and artists. Named for the witch-hunt's most zealous prosecutor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), McCarthyism was the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history. In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture. That anticommunist crusade...used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.[1]
When President Truman authorized the use of two nuclear weapons in 1945 against the Japanese in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, the nature of international security was changed irreversibly. At that time, the United States had what was said to have a monopoly of atomic bombs. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union began working on atomic weaponry. In 1949, it had already detonated it first atomic bomb and tensions began to heat up between the two countries. With the information that the Soviets had tested their first bomb, the United States began work on more powerful weapons1, and a fight for nuclear superiority had begun.
In today’s society, many countries and even citizens of the United States question the U.S. government’s decision to get involved in nuclear warfare. These people deemed it unnecessary and stated that the U.S. is a hypocrite that preaches peace, but causes destruction and death. Before and during World War II the U.S. was presented with a difficult decision on whether or not to develop and use the atomic bomb. The U.S. decided to develop the atomic bomb based on the fear they had for the safety of the nation. In August 1939 nuclear physicists sent manuscripts to Albert Einstein in fear the Germany might use the new knowledge of fission on the uranium nucleus as way to construct weapons.
The era following WWII and the era we are currently in portray times in United State's history that united our country in some ways, but in other ways were times of constrained freedom and illustrated the limitations of our country. McCarthyism, the period in the early to mid 1950's, was a time that arose from once good relations with the Soviet Union to a time where there was fear of communism within our country. Terrorism, a term that has been around, but now brings new meaning. The U.S had attacks in the 90's in Oklahoma, the Olympics, and the previous attacks on the World Trade Center, but none amounted to September 11, 2001 with the amount of casualties, the desperate measures of the attackers and the cracks in our security system.
For more than two thousand years anti-Semitism has plagued the Jews, however, the term has only been around for about thirty years (Strack 594). Due to the hateful accusations and of those who did not understand their religion, Jews, as a scorned people, gradually became more exclusive and intolerant of other religions. Because of Judaism’s strict adherence to their own beliefs and unwillingness to consider any alternatives, Muslims and Christians have scorned and persecuted Jews.
The McCarthy era is very similar to the Salem Witch trials. They are both similar, because they both dealt with hysteria. Hysteria is an uncontrollable fear or outburst of emotion. Both things had to do with people accusing each other of people being communist, and people being witches.
When the United States caught word that Germany was close to creating the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists wanted to create it first, for the U.S. After three years of research, the first small atomic device was exploded on July 16, 1945 in the lab at Los Alamos. Having proved their concept worked, a larger scale bomb was built. Less than a month later, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan (Rosenberg).