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McCARTHYISM
THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS
THE CRUCIBLE
Republican U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin initiated the Second Red Scare in the U.S.
(1950 to 1954). The dubious methods used during those investigations of alleged communists
or sympathizers are referred to as McCarthyism. This term is also used more generally to describe
reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or
patriotism of political adversaries.
The Crucible is a 1952 play by the American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatization of the
Salem Witch Trials that took place in the Province of Massachusetts Bay during 1692 and 1693.
Miller wrote the play as an allegory of McCarthyism.
RESEARCH TOPICS:
1. First Red Scare (1917–20), inspired by Communism's emergence as a recognized political force.
Thanks in part to its success in organizing labor unions and its early opposition to fascism, the
Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) increased its membership through the 1930s, reaching
a peak of about 75,000 members in 1940–41.
2. The Cold War began almost immediately, as the Soviet Union installed repressive Communist puppet
régimes across Central and Eastern Europe, while the United States backed right-wing forces in Greece
and China.
3. Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko was a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy to Canada in Ottawa,
Ontario. He defected on September 5, 1945, with 109 documents on Soviet espionage activities in the
West. This forced Prime Minister Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in
Canada. Gouzenko exposed Joseph Stalin's efforts to steal nuclear secrets, and the technique of
planting sleeper agents. The "Gouzenko Affair" is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War.
The New York Times described Gouzenko's actions as having "awakened the people of North America
to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage."
4. Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American spy for the Soviet Union from 1938 until 1945. In 1945,
she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence and became an informer for the U.S.
She exposed two networks of spies, ultimately naming over 80 Americans who had engaged in
espionage for the Soviets. When her testimony became public in 1948, it became a media sensation
and had a major effect on the popular anti-communism of the McCarthy era.
5. Republican U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin at a February 9, 1950 of the
Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia produced a piece of paper which he claimed
contained a list of known Communists working for the State Department
6. The Hollywood Blacklist came into being in 1947 when the House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC) began to summon certain Hollywood entertainment professionals on the suspicion
that their work was communist-inspired. (The Hollywood Ten)
7. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the various anti-communist
organizations led the hunt for American communists and communist sympathizers.
8. President Harry Truman's Executive Order 9835 initiated a program of loyalty reviews for
federal employees in 1947.
9. Regarding Soviet Cold War espionage activities, Alger Hiss, a high-level State Department official,
was convicted of perjury. Hiss was found guilty of espionage; the statute of limitations had run out for
that crime, but he was convicted of having perjured himself when he denied that charge in earlier
testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
10. In Great Britain, Klaus Fuchs confessed to committing espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union while
working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the War.
11. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested in 1950 on charges of stealing atomic bomb secrets
for the Soviets and were executed in 1953.
12. J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic
bomb, then working as a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission, was stripped of his security
clearance after a four-week hearing. Oppenheimer had received a top-secret clearance in 1947, but
was denied clearance in the harsher climate of 1954.
13. One of the most influential opponents of McCarthyism was the famed CBS newscaster and analyst
Edward R. Murrow. On October 20, 1953, Murrow's show See It Now aired an episode about the
dismissal of Milo Radulovich, a former reserve Air Force lieutenant who was accused of associating with
Communists.
14. More conservative politicians who referred to progressive reforms such as child labor laws and
women's suffrage as "Communist" or "Red plots" increased in the 1930s in reaction to the New Deal
policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Many conservatives equated the New Deal with
socialism or Communism, and saw its policies as evidence that Communist policy-makers in the
Roosevelt administration had heavily influenced the government.
15. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was one of the nation's most fervent anti-communists, and one of the
most powerful, was fanatically involved in the pursuit of subversive Communists in the United States.
16. McCarthyism was supported by a variety of groups, including the American Legion, American
Public Relations Forum, and the Minute Women of the U.S.A., and United Nations
Alaska Mental Health Bill.
17. William F. Buckley, Jr., was a conservative American author and commentator. In 1954, Buckley
co-wrote a book McCarthy and His Enemies with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., strongly
defending Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism.
18. A key figure in the end of the blacklisting of McCarthyism was John Henry Faulk. Host of an
afternoon comedy radio show, Faulk was a leftist active in his union, the American Federation of
Television and Radio Artists.
19. Much of the undoing of McCarthyism came at the hands of the Supreme Court. As Richard Rovere
wrote in his biography of Joseph McCarthy, "[T]he United States Supreme Court took judicial notice of
the rents McCarthy was making in the fabric of liberty and thereupon wrote a series of decisions that
have made the fabric stronger than before." Those decisions include Slochower v. Board of Education,
Yates v. United States, Watkins v. United States, and Kent v. Dulles