McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare

A small Communist Party had existed in the United States since the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution; even at its peak it had only about 80,000 members. Real Soviet espionage occurred: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of passing atomic secrets and executed in 1953, and former State Department official Alger Hiss, accused of spying, was convicted of perjury after a second trial. Combined with the Soviet atomic bomb, the communist victory in China, and the Korean War, these cases fed fears of a vast conspiracy.

In March 1947, facing anticommunist pressure, President Truman created loyalty reviews for federal employees. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated Hollywood beginning in 1947; between 1949 and 1954, congressional committees conducted more than one hundred investigations into subversion. The Internal Security Act of 1950 required “communist organizations” to register with the government.

On February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy declared he had a list of 205 State Department employees who were members of the Communist Party. He had no such list; the number changed to 57, then 81. A Senate committee called his charges “a fraud and a hoax,” but McCarthy’s accusations made him famous, and he attacked the Truman administration as “soft on communism.”

The Red Scare reached far beyond McCarthy. HUAC asked witnesses, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” and pressed them to name others; hundreds of film artists were blacklisted. Thirty-one University of California professors were dismissed in 1950 for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. The singer and activist Paul Robeson had his passport revoked. In a parallel “Lavender Scare,” gay Americans were targeted as supposed security risks vulnerable to blackmail.

In 1954 McCarthy took on the U.S. Army. Twenty million people watched the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, in which Army counsel Joseph Welch rebuked him: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67–22 to condemn McCarthy. He died in 1957, and by the late 1950s the worst of the Red Scare was over.

The Red Scare cost many Americans their jobs and reputations and pressed the country toward conformity. Playwright Arthur Miller compared it to the Salem witch trials in The Crucible (1953). As early as June 1950, the editor Freda Kirchwey described “McCarthyism” as the means by which “a handful of men, disguised as hunters of subversion, cynically subvert the instruments of justice” for political gain.