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McCarthyism Essay
Quicksand can be described as two things. A loose wet sand that yields to easy pressure, or a bad or dangerous situation in which it is hard to escape. Over the course of time in America, there were many things Americans feared. But the most frightening thing to come to America was the fear of Communism.
Coming off of World War 2 and going into the cold war many people across the nation grew the fear of communism. This fear was made a lot bigger when the Cuban missile crisis was going on. As the tension grew between America and Russia and democracy and communism, the penalty grew for being a part of the communist party.
If someone was called on for being a member of the communist party they were in big trouble. There was nothing they could say nor do to get out of the mess they were in. It didn’t Matter if they were a part of the Communist party or hated the communists, in general, all they could do was Give the names of their friends and family members or just people that they knew of that were also a part of the Communist Party. in the movie Guilty by suspicion, Robert De Niro plays a man that was found guilty for being a part of the Communist party
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the definition of McCarthyism is “The practice of making accusations Of subversion or treason without proper evidence or regard”.David Mara was a victim of McCarthyism because all that they had for evidence was that he attended a few communist meetings over a decade before the trials against him had started. this was in no way proper evidence to claim that David Merrill was a communist, as he time and time again denied the fact that he was a communist and believed in communism. In exchange for his partial freedom, he was ordered to give up the names of the people he knew to be a communist. In the end, he was faced with a challenge in the quicksand he was now submerged
In the mid-1900’s, communism was a big issue worldwide. Communism is a political theory created by Karl Marx in which everyone essentially gets an equal share in society, including the fact that houses are publicly owned by the government. The controversial issue to this concept is that some jobs make money than others, so people of a higher class didn’t feel like they were getting their fair share. The case and trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg has to do with communism because the couple was accused of committing espionage against the United States. Showcased in the article “Case Against Rosenberg Falls Apart,” published by Achieve3000, Americans were afraid of communism, and the acts by the government were very impactful to society.
Authors used their literary work to get a point across to the public in the story The Crucible; Arthur Miller used events and characters to show the similarities to McCarthyism which was prevalent in the 1950s. McCarthyism was associated with the period in the United Sates also known as the Second Red Scare. McCarthyism is very similar in the way that Joe McCarthy accused Americans of being communist and in The Crucible people were being accused of being witches. It is known that Arthur Miller wrote this story as a reaction to a tragic time in our history.
After the end of WW2, two major governmental institutions, the USA and the USSR, with conflicting political ideologies and agendas, set forth to dominate each other in international politics. This period of time, also known as the Cold War, initiated an era of crazed hysteria in the United States as these two governments frequently clashed and bitterly fought. As a result, the frightened public grew delirious as the world grew dangerously close to a calamitous nuclear war, which ultimately prompted the Eisenhower administration to hinder the spread of communism and encourage the U.S. population to rapidly pursue higher education for the future welfare of this nation. One of the biggest fears of the American people is that the concept of communism contrasts drastically from the concept of capitalism, which the United States was essentially founded upon. The United States, as the public believed, was not a land of perfect communal equality, but rather a land of equal opportunity.
As for McCarthy he accuses anyone he sees. He even began to question the integrity of
Herbert Block, a cartoon illustrator during McCarthyism, depicts the absurdity of the communist accusations during the 1950s through his drawings of fictitious evidence and the power hungry government. Despite the lack of evidence, the influence of the government’s spurious claims causes unnecessary hysteria and chaos within America. Likewise, these events are prevalent within Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. The witch trials symbolize the court hearings during McCarthyism, and an identical absence of feasible evidence and a town overridden by fear lead to fallacious convictions. Block’s political cartoons embody the fraudulent evidence and hysteria over communism during McCarthy’s reign, which relates to the witch trials that Miller describes
Senator Joseph McCarthy used many tactics to persuade Americans to oppose communism and indict those who supported it. Communism had tangible shape, and Americans were worried that people in the U.S. would start leaning to the far left like several other countries such as the USSR and China (Schrecker). In order to prevent this, the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was founded. The Committee's purpose was to investigate those organizations and individuals it deemed "un-American." They first went to Hollywood because the movie industry was considered "corrupted". Ten individuals, called the Hollywood Ten, were asked to testify against other Hollywood residents who were questionable com...
The United States was in a state of scare when they feared that communist agents would come and try to destroy our government system. An example of this scare was the Cold war. During the cold war the U.S. supported the anti-communist group while the Soviet Union favored the communist party. Many people who still supported the communist party still lived in the U.S. When the U.S. joined the Cold war, trying to rid the communist party from Europe and Asia, the U.S. were afraid that the people living in the United States that still supported communism were spies that would give intel back to the Soviet Union to try to destroy their government. If anybody was a suspected communist, if somebody just didn’t like somebody, or if they were even greedy they could accuse the person of communism and the person would be thrown in the penitentiary, thus, starting the second red scare.
The Communist Party was one of the main sections in Soviet society that was impacted profoundly by Stalin’s terror. In 1935, the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a faithful Communist and Bolshevik party member that had certain popularity, threatening Stalin’s consolidation of power, initiated The Great Purge. His death, triggering three important, widely publicised ‘show trials’ in Moscow, ultimately encouraged the climate of terror during the Great Purge. Bolsheviks Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates were accused of conspiring against Stalin and the government, with each confessing to their supposed crimes, which were then broadcast around the world. It was later discovered that these confessions were forced after long months of psychological abuse and cruel acts of torture. As Stalin...
Just as it was a sin drift on to the side of the devil in the time of the crucible, it was the same to drift on to the side of communism in the 1950's, when Arthur Miller wrote this play. In the 1950's Senator Joe Macarthy set up a campaign to rid the United States of all communist supporters. These communist trials would be broadcast on national television. It would involve the accused to admit their guilt even though they were completely innocent, and give the names of 10 other would-be communists or face exile, torture, invasion of family privacy etc. Arthur Miller uses the events of the Salem witch-hunts to represent and show what the communist trials of the 1950's were. They were both based on false premises and paranoia, and as more people got involved, more people suffered, this can be summarised by calling it the 'Snowball effect.
Beginning in the late 1940s, as the Cold War escalated between the United States, the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, the United States went through a period of intense anti-communist tensions and suspicion. Many thousands of individuals were suspected of being Soviet spies, Communists, or communist sympathizers. Although the American Communist Party was never illegal under Federal law, membership in the party or support of its goals were regarded by many as tantamount to treason. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of this era of anti-communism. The term McCarthyism was coined that same year to describe and condemn the senator's methods, which were widely seen as demagogic and based on reckless, unsubstantiated accusations. Later the term was applied more generally to the anti-communism of the late 1940s through the late 1950s; today, it is often used even more broadly, to describe public attacks made on persons' character and/or patriotism that involve the sort of tactics associated with McCarthy.
The attitude of the citizens of the United States was a tremendous influence on the development of McCarthyism. The people living in the post World War II United States felt fear and anger because communism was related with Germany, Italy, and Russia who had all at one point been enemies of the United States during the war. If the enemies were communists then, communists were enemies and any communists or even communist sympathizers were a threat to the American way of life. "From the Bolshevik Revolution on, radicals were seen as foreign agents or as those ...
Taking advantage of the situation, Joseph McCarthy, a right wing senator, accused thousands of public figures of being a communist or associating with the group, and brought many of them to court for it. Most of the people targeted during this time were well known by the public, usually being a government official, celebrity, or homosexual, and shared a common viewpoint; they were well known for being a leftist (“Joseph R. McCarthy”). He often had little evidence to backup his claims, but proceeded to blame the advancement of communist governments on secret communists in the US government. When the accused were brought to court, McCarthy would often times exaggerate their views to where it could be believable that they were communists, but in most cases there was never enough proof to indict them. His position of power is what allowed him to continue to reveal the secret communists in the US, even with his lack of information to backup his claims. McCarthy wasn’t the only one exposing innocent people as communists throughout the country (“McCarthy Says Communists Are in State Department”). After seeing how he could still succeed and people were still supporting him, groups emerged solely to expose communists living in the US, just like McCarthy was doing. Mccarthy’s actions lead to a mass hysteria of falsely exposing people as communists, and
In 1950s, Joseph McCarthy started to accuse hundreds of people for believing in communism so that he can strike fear in people hearts and can remain in power, just
In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which details the Salem witch trials, Abigail has an affair with John Proctor, and then tries to kill his wife with a charm. This leads to her being thought a witch, but they point fingers at others to keep the spotlight off of them. Eventually many people are hung for witchcraft because Abigail and her friends will not tell the truth of what happened the night they were dancing. During the McCarthy trials, the Cold War was currently going on, and the public was getting anxious about the recent findings that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were found guilty of being communist spies. Joseph McCarthy used this to get power by convicting others of Communism in his trials. McCarthy and the witch trials is a classic example of history repeating itself, when there is no way to prove yourself innocent of an invisible crime.
The McCarthy Era, a name given to the time period were Senator McCarthy set off an era of paranoia and accusations, was a time period full of fears that the threat of communism was not from the presence of the Soviet Union, but from communists living within the United States. Many individuals during this time period were deported, despite being legal citizens, and socially shunned for suspicion of being affiliated with communists. Alger Hiss was a notable figure, during this time period that was accused of being a Soviet spy and was later convicted of perjury. This fear of communists was not fed by McCarthy alone, John Foster Dulles presented ideas of the dangers of Communism, as stated, “If world communism captures any American State, however small, a new and perilous front is established which will increase the danger to the entire free world and require even greater sacrifices from the American people.” (Doc. B). President Eisenhower, however, attempted to settle these fears, by claiming that there is too much hysteria surrounding communism (Doc. A). President Eisenhower attempted to reassure the American people that the U.S. is perfectly capable of protecting its self against