Cold War To The Soviet Communists example essay topic

Since Joseph McCarthy's name has become synonymous with persecution and the suppression of dissent, is it accurate to describe the so-called 'Red Scare' as McCarthyism? What other factors were there to explain this intolerance? On the 29th of June 1940, The United States Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, making it illegal for anyone in the US to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government. The main aim of the Alien Registration Act was to weaken the American Communist Party and other left-wing political groups in the United States. In 1947 the House of Un-American Activities Committee began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry.

It was not until 1950 that Senator Joseph McCarthy made an appearance, and yet it seems the concept of 'McCarthyism' was emerging a decade earlier. The Alliance with the Soviet Union during World War Two was an uneasy one, and as soon as the war ended right-wing Republicans accused the late President Roosevelt and liberal Democrats of appeasing Stalin and allowing his power to grow. The Republican's success in the 1946 Congressional election led President Truman to the conclusion that he needed to be tougher on communism in order to avoid political suicide. He needed the issue of the moment behind him in order to successfully pitch the Truman Doctrine to the American people. But he also had to be seen as being tough on communist threats at home, threats that really captured the American people's imagination, as well as abroad. So it could be said Truman launched the Great Red Scare.

In order to convince Americans that the United States should challenge the Soviets for the status of world superpower, President Truman was advised that he should "scare the hell out of the country". To fight this Cold War so soon after the Second World War the US Government had to be able to justify the spending of so much of the taxpayer's money, and to do this the Government had to get the US citizens behind them. In his speeches in the late 1940's and early 1950's, Truman warned that there was a momentous global struggle ahead between the "free world" and the communist world. Truman and his advisors used apocalyptic rhetoric about a treacherous and decisive conflict between two "competing ways of life" to convince Americans that they were confronting a dangerous enemy that needed to be contained, if not stopped. It was in this context of increasing American alarm about the Soviet threat that a series of events in the late 1940's caused many Americans to wonder if the United States was beginning to lose the Cold War to the Soviet communists. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb.

China became a communist state after the Chinese Civil War. In 1950, communist North Korea invaded South Korea and tried to impose communism over the whole country. The United States became involved to prevent a communist victory. The US wanted to reunify Korea under American control, destroying the communist faction.

But in October of 1950, Communist China entered into the Korean War, fearing the United States would try to take them on next if they were successful in Korea. Between 1950 and 1953, the United States and China fought a bloody war in Korea, with neither side able to break the stalemate. In 1953, after President Eisenhower threatened to drop atomic bombs on China, the Chinese agreed to an end to the war, which resulted in Korea once again being divided into a communist North and a democratic South, rendering the United State's efforts effectively useless. Faced with this growing communist concern, some politicians began to speculate that it was traitors within the United States who were responsible for American failures in the Cold War. One of these was Senator Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy's first years in the Senate were unimpressive. He was being investigated for tax offences and taking bribes from the Pepsi-Cola Company. Afraid that he would lose his seat in the senate, McCarthy held a meeting with some of his closest advisers and asked for suggestions on how he could win the upcoming election. Edmund Walsh, a Roman Catholic priest, came up with the idea that he should begin a campaign against clandestine communists working within Democratic administration.

McCarthy thought this was his ticket to re-election and at Wheeling on 9th February 1950, he made a speech where he claimed to have a list of 205 people in the State Department known to be members of the American Communist Party. The list of names was not a secret and had been in fact published by the Secretary of State in 1946. These people had been identified during a preliminary screening of 3,000 federal employees. Some had been communists but others had been fascists, alcoholics and sexual deviants. He said that the world was split into two camps, that of communistic atheism and that of Christianity. If screened, McCarthy's own drink problems and sexual preferences would have certainly put him on the list.

So it appears that McCarthy was merely jumping on a bandwagon that had been around for some time to save his political career. He was receiving information from friends in high places, such as J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. William Sullivan, one of Hoover's agents, later admitted that: "We were the ones who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using".

McCarthy ironically declared: "When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within". Between 1950 and 1954, Senator McCarthy and others held government hearings to reveal and remove these Communists traitors in government and society. McCarthy summoned major American writers, directors, actors, government officials to testify before his committee about their knowledge and involvement in this communist conspiracy. In fact, in 1951 McCarthy cast aspersions on President Truman himself: "The President.

He is their captive. The President is not master in his own house. Those who are master there not only have a desire to protect the sappers and miners -- they could not do otherwise. They themselves are not free. They belong to a larger conspiracy, the world-wide web of which has been spun from Moscow".

Responding to these charges that he and his advisers were communist agents, President Truman charged that McCarthy was "the greatest asset the Communist had". McCarthyism soon spread to every part of American life in the early 1950's. Federal, state, and local governments compiled blacklists of people and organizations suspected of being communists. If your name was placed on one of these blacklists, you could lose your job and your reputation could be destroyed.

Only ten percent of the actors, writers, directors and producers on the Hollywood blacklist ever worked in Hollywood again. Because of this growing anti-communist hysteria in the early 1950's created by McCarthyism, Americans began to look over their shoulders wondering if it was in fact possible that their friends and neighbours could be communists. Some people used the charge of communism to eliminate their enemies and their competition. Some might say that was exactly what McCarthy was doing. Other Americans, fearing that someone would point the finger at them, charged others with being communists. If you could prove that someone else was a communist, no one would point the accusing finger at you.

Political activists such as feminists, Black Civil Rights campaigners and students were accused of being communists. McCarthyism and the political and cultural anti-communist hysteria it created threatened the American's basic rights. Many Americans in the 1950's were afraid to speak their mind or talk about their opinions for fear that they would stand out from the crowd and be called communists. McCarthyism allowed the government to violate the basic civil and political rights of Americans throughout the Cold War.

In the 1950's and 1960's, the FBI and the CIA opened people's mail, followed and pressured political groups challenging government policy, and tried to "neutralize" those who did not support America's aggressive Cold War policies. "Red Scare" seems to be the most appropriate label for the period of anti-communist hysteria in the 1940's and 50's, for that is all it was, a scare. There was no real evidence that communism was a genuine threat, and it seems highly unlikely that a communist revolution could ever have survived, given that anti-communist sentiment had been around to a greater or lesser extent since 1917. It was a device used by the government to garner support and minimise dissent from the American public regarding the Cold War. Joseph McCarthy used it entirely for his own advantage. It has taken on his name simply because he took it to extremes, which backfired on the Democratic government.