Mccarthyism And The Red Scare Essay

Throughout the history of the United States of America, Americans have been very proud of their style of government and against anything that infringed upon their rights. Those beliefs were displayed heavily during The Red Scare. The Red Scare was, simply put, the fear of communistic ideas flowing into the United States of America and infiltrating the brains of Americans. Surely, Americans would respond in various ways to this, which begs the question: how did The Red Scare affect the United States of America?
The Red Scare originated during World War I. This happened after Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which was a revolution to change the style of government that Russia had at the time. Americans grew fearful of communism and acts of anarchy

because of events that had transpired. Those events include the 1919 anarchist bombings, which was a series of bombings, some being mailed to politicians and businessmen, while others were detonated bombings in cities. However, the more referenced Red Scare begins right after World War II. It began to heat up due to the Cold War between the United States and Russia. It intensified even more when concerns were raised that communists and those that sympathize with those ideals were actually inside the American government working as Soviet spies, possibly endangering citizens and U.S. Security. In order to analyze politicians and those that work in the U.S. Government, the House Un-American  Activities Committee was formed in 1938. This led to investigations inside the government and even Hollywood. A man that assisted in these investigations was the longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. During the first Red Scare he publicly denounced communism and communists, he was truly anticommunist. To demonstrate the length of investigation that was going on, Hoover and his agents formed a case against Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg that led to their execution due to their conviction of espionage in 1951.
In addition, this was during the time of the Cold War – the political war between the United States of America and the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991. This war was limited in terms of action and violence, and was more focused on politics, economy, and image of the countries. While there was never much violence, there were intrusions by way of spies. This is important when talking about the Red Scare because the fear of Soviet spies in the United States of America caused more fear and prompted the American government to strengthen their national security. However, when the American government strengthened their national security, this caused many individual liberties to be disregarded, such as privacy.
Furthermore, the public began to have increasing concerns about communism.

In 1949, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb and Mao Zedong's communistic forces took over China. Just a year after that, the Korean War had begun. All of this was just showing the American people that communism is spreading all around the world. This would be the time that would become to be the height of the Red Scare, specifically when Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a speech in which he said he  knew of 205 members of the Communist Party that worked for the United States Department of State, this began the era that is known as The McCarthy Era. The McCarthy era was a time in which Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activites Committee essentially hunted down communists, monitoring citizens and their behavior. This led to even more public fear and hysteria over communists, and of course, dozens of

investigations.
This research paper will cover multiple historians' takes on the Red Scare, what it involved, what became of it, and will evaluate them to show how they answered the question posed above. The answers to the question will be of a variety including expanding women's social status, civil rights, McCarthyism, Hollywood's blacklisting, the FBI, and political repression and intolerance. These sources were chosen because they will provide a very broad scope of answers. Furthermore, documents will be examined that are from the time period of the Red Scare. Lastly, the closing of this research paper will explain which arguments are most likely to be an effect of the Red Scare.
To start off, this essay will look at Women Arise: The Red Threat On The Domestic Scene which is a chapter in Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace written by Mary C. Brennan. In this, Brennan argues that during the red scare, women, specifically conservative and traditional women, were stretching the social status of women. As written by Brennan, “ If, in the process of combating this enemy, they ended up expanding their overall political participation, that was a consequence most of them had not consciously anticipated or, for the most part, desired.”1 The enemy she was talking about was communism. Brennan goes on to say how women fought against communism, “Some women acted in ways that defied conventional limits regarding female behavior. Others took a more traditional route. They joined clubs; they wrote letters, newsletters, books, and articles; they gave speeches and organized demonstrations."2 And because the Red Scare was such an important issue, Brennan states, “Most male anticommunists agreed as long as women continued to frame their concerns in a feminine way.”3 This is when it heavily set forth the motion for a new, expanded status of women. Brennan says that, “...anticommunists in general tended to focus so intently on the menace of communism that they ignored the changing realities around them.”4 Brennan says that this is women pushed to enter the workforce and because of the Great Depression there was a lot of consumer goods available, and this too “enticed more women, eager to purchase those goods, into the workforce at the same time 'everyone' assumed women were content to stay at home.”5 Furthermore, Brennan references Margaret Chase Smith, and what she had said to members of the American Woman's Association – that women were important to politics, however, there were three things that “discouraged women from being politically active: '(1) underestimation and lack of realization of their latent power, (2) indifference to public life because of their admirable, understandable and traditional roles of homemakers, and (3) the opposition of men to women in public offices.' ”6 And this is what pushed for more women in politics, as they learned from previous generations and they overcame those things discouraging them. Here they “combined with the ability to 'clean things up.' These women used their knowledge of domestic chores to improve the living conditions of their neighbors around settlement houses and cloaked their challenges to government officials in feminine promises of 'sweeping away corruption.' Both the abstract and the concrete housekeeping provided women with a nonthreatening route to political activism.”7
This next argument is that one of the effects of the Red Scare was political intolerance and repression derived from Political Intolerance and Political Repression During the McCarthy Red Scare which is part of The American Political Science Review and is written by James L. Gibson. In this, Gibson talks about a linkage between political intolerance and the degree of repression, whilst using the elitist theory (outbreaks of political repression are due to the public) to argue that the repression of communists during the McCarthy Era is because of mass public intolerance of communists. To further his argument he references a Texas statute that was passed, in which Texas made it illegal to “commit, attempt to commit, or aid in the commission of any act intended to overthrow,”8 the Texas government. Also, Texas deemed it illegal to “advocate, abet, advise, or teach by any means any person to commit,”9 Regarding this, Gibson states, “This is indeed a constraint on the speech of political minorities and therefore is treated as repressive.”10 Shortly afterwards, Gibson references The States and Subversion by Walter Gellhorn, “Traditionally the criminal law has dealt with the malefactor, the one who himself committed an offense. Departing from this tradition is the recent tendency to ascribe criminal potentialities to a body of persons (usually, though not invariably, the Communists) and to lay restraints upon any individual who can be linked with the group.”11 To continue his argument for intolerance during the Red Scare he references an index that “is a Guttman scale based on the responses to fifteen items concerning support for the civil liberties of Communists, socialists, and atheists”12, which shows that sixteen of the states had a majority of people that were in favor of banning public employment of communists, seventeen states had a majority of people that were in favor of banning communists from politics, and ten states had a majority of people that were in favor of outright banning communists.13 As for the actual politics of it, Gibson states, “ Of the fifty states, twenty-eight took none of these actions against Communists. Two states -Arkansas and Texas-banned Communists from the ballot and from public employment, as well as banning the Party itself and requiring that Communists register with the government. Another five states adopted all three measures against the Communists, but did not require that they register with the government. Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Washington did not formally bar Communists from public employment but did outlaw the party and forbade its members from participating in politics. The remaining twelve states took some, but not all, actions against the Communists.”14
This next argument is that the Hollywood blacklisting (due to associations with communists or those with communist ties) actually helped mold Hollywood into the Hollywood it is today.

This argument is from We Do Not Ask You to Condone This: How the Blacklist Saved Hollywood which is a piece from the Cinema Journal – 39, written by Jon Lewis. He begins by saying one of the major changes to Hollywood post-blacklisting is that, for the most part, films do not show any political leaning or affiliation. He then references a Gallup Poll released November 29, 1947, which states “Do you think the Hollywood writers who refused to say whether or not they were members of the Communist Party should be punished or not?”15 He says the results were “Forty-Seven percent said that they should be punished, thirty-nine percent said that they should not be punished, and fourteen percent had no opinion.”16 Continuing off of that, Lewis goes on to say that the suspicions of communists in Hollywood and the poll had affected the Screen Actor's Guild, as he says, “ From the start, SAG's success with studio management was tied directly to the box office clout of its celebrity leadership.”17 He continues on saying that the SAG (Screen Actor's Guild) was particularly affected and began to interact with the public in order to defend Hollywood, “As SAG became less and less useful to star actors in their negotiations with studio management, star actors used SAG to promote better public relations, joining

management in an effort to protect the industry from outside regulation.”18 Jon Lewis then begins talking about unions in old Hollywood referencing a testimony from Walt Disney, “[The Communists] have been hiding behind this labor set up, they get themselves closely tied up in the labor thing, so that if you try to get rid of them they make a labor case out of it.”19 Furthermore, he continues by saying, “Arthur Babbitt, a senior animator and pro-unionist, did just that. When Disney attempted to fire him for his union activity, Babbitt took his case to the NLRB. Disney was ultimately forced to pay Babbitt back wages plus a hefty penalty... It also marked the end of the studio's golden age...”20