Overview - McCarthyism McCarthyism Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. History: Government and Politics, 2009

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), a Wisconsin Republican, led a tidal wave of anticommunist political repression in the United States. McCarthy and his allies claimed that communists had infiltrated the federal government and other institutions, and were threatening the American way of life. The attacks were often baseless, but they nevertheless destroyed the careers of thousands of individuals, some of whom had done nothing more than attend a left-wing political meeting ten or fifteen years earlier. Originally associated with generic Cold War anticommunism, the term McCarthyism eventually came to refer to a particularly mean-spirited and groundless accusation based on paranoia and characterized by political grandstanding.

Seeds of Anticommunism Communism was under attack by conservatives in the United States long before the onset of the Cold War. The industrialization that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave rise to a fairly large and active socialist movement in response to horrible working conditions and poor wages. Large segments of the labor movement embraced socialist philosophies, and the movement gained momentum with the arrival of waves of European immigrants who brought with them traditions of militant labor activism. The dawn of the Great Depression in 1929 sparked a period of dramatic growth for communism in the United States, as Americans searched for a response to the economic upheaval the nation was experiencing. Communist rhetoric became common among displaced workers as well as artists and intellectuals.

As the 1930s progressed, many people who had embraced communism began to sour on the ideology as news spread of such world events as the brutal purges carried out by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) and the Soviets' signing of a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. There was also a backlash among some conservatives against President Franklin Roosevelt's (1882-1945) New Deal policies, which were too socialistic for their tastes.

By the time the United States entered World War II in late 1941, communism had largely fallen out of favor in the United States. In 1938 the House of Representatives formed the Committee on Un- American Activities (HUAC). Two years later the Smith Act was passed, making it illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of government. Various loyalty programs designed to weed out communists from jobs in the federal government were put into place over the next few years.

Growing Paranoia After the end of World War II in 1945, halting the spread of communism became a central theme of American policy both at home and abroad. In 1947 President Harry Truman (1884-1972) signed an executive order barring all communists and fascists from government work, and the following year, Communist Party leaders in the United States were prosecuted under the Smith Act. Communist paranoia continued to escalate as the Soviet Union expanded its global reach. The 1949 victory of Communist forces under Mao Zedong (1893-1976) in China's civil war further unsettled American nerves. Another law, the McCarran Internal Security Act, was passed by Congress in 1950, virtually outlawing communism altogether. The act actually went even further than that, turning into outlaws even those who were shown simply to have a "sympathetic association" with undesirable organizations and individuals. In spite of these actions, conservative critics continued to assault the Truman administration as being too soft on communism. Such was the national mood when Senator McCarthy made his appearance in the national spotlight.

McCarthy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1947 after a brief and undistinguished career as a lawyer and circuit court judge in his home state of Wisconsin. McCarthy's first few years in the Senate were fairly uneventful. That changed abruptly in February 1950, when McCarthy announced in a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, that he was in possession of a list—presumably written on the piece of paper he was waving around—of the names of 205 known members of the Communist Party who were currently working for the U.S. State Department. The number tended to shift in subsequent versions of the claim over the weeks that followed.

McCarthy's claim created a nationwide stir, coming close on the heels of the conviction of State Department official Alger Hiss (1904-1996) for perjury related to his testimony about involvement with Soviet espionage agents. McCarthy moved quickly to exploit his newfound fame. He was extremely skillful at manipulating the media. At no point did he manage to produce concrete evidence to back up his claims, but it did not seem to matter, even after a Senate subcommittee investigated his allegations in the spring of 1950 and found them to be baseless. Bolstered by the onset of the Korean War and the arrests of Julius (1918-1953) and Ethel (1915-1953) Rosenberg for allegedly spying for the Soviets, Americans were primed to believe in the authenticity of McCarthy's "Red scare" assertions. The Republicans happily played on these fears, laying the blame for the spread of communism in the United States squarely on the shoulders of the Democrats, who had controlled the federal government for twenty years. McCarthy went so far in 1951 as to call this period of Democratic domination and in particular the leadership of Truman's secretary of state, George C. Marshall (1880-1959), part of "a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man" In this sense, McCarthy's tactics were an unqualified success; in 1952 the Republicans seized control of Congress and, with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), the White House.

The Role of the FBI Throughout the McCarthyism period, Senator McCarthy himself never actually documented the existence of single communist in a government job, but his power to deflate his political enemies with false accusations was enormous. He also had a powerful ally in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), perhaps the most virulent anticommunist in the federal government. The FBI provided much of the information, sketchy though it often was, that fueled the investigations and prosecutions of suspected communists and communist sympathizers. So eager was Hoover to expose the "Red menace" that he regularly resorted to such underhanded methods as unauthorized and often illegal wiretaps, break-ins, and media leaks.

Once identified as a communist or sympathizer, many individuals were forced to testify before one of several investigating bodies, most notably the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC members would browbeat their prey—some of whom were there on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence gathered through questionable means—into not only admitting their own past ties to the Communist Party, but also informing on others who had participated with them. Those who refused to cooperate could claim their Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, but they usually lost their jobs just the same, and saw their lives thrown into chaos.

People who defied HUAC often learned the hard way that their name had been placed on an unofficial "blacklist." Many industries had blacklists containing the names of people who were no longer employable because they had been identified as communists or communist sympathizers. The most famous blacklist was the one for the Hollywood movie industry. It included the names of the so-called Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and directors who had stood up to HUAC in 1947.

Discredit and Censure The threat of losing one's job turned out to be a powerful deterrent, leading people to avoid association with any organization that could be remotely considered leftist. Thousands of people were fired during the peak years of McCarthyism. Academia was a favorite target; about 20 percent of those called to testify before a state or federal investigative body were college faculty or graduate students.

Ironically, the Republican takeover of Congress turned out to be the beginning of the end of McCarthyism. With Republicans in control in Washington, McCarthy could no longer weave tales of communist conspiracies within the federal government. He turned his attention instead to the military, which turned out to be a major strategic blunder. With World War II still fairly fresh in the minds of most Americans, the military was generally revered by the public. McCarthy's new round of attacks was met with hostility, and, perhaps more important, he lost the support of the Eisenhower administration, whose leader was himself a military hero.

It soon became clear that McCarthy had invented many of his accusations out of thin air, and while Americans still feared the spread communism as much as ever, they lost their taste for the witch-hunt. In 1954 McCarthy was censured by the Senate for his misconduct. He died three years later a bitter and disgraced has-been. By the late 1950s the repression and hysteria that characterized the McCarthyism era had pretty much evaporated, and Americans understood that many of their neighbors had been unjustly ruined.

The Hollywood Ten

Artists and intellectuals, with their enduring interest in maintaining freedom of expression, have long been attracted to left-wing politics. The Hollywood film industry is no exception, from Jane Fonda's activism against the Vietnam War to the outspoken progressive views of Tim Robbins in the Iraq War era. In the fall of 1947, ten prominent movie writers and directors were subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) as part of a broad investigation into "the extent of Communist infiltration in the Hollywood motion picture industry." Dubbed the "Hollywood Ten, " these artists were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Robert Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo.

All ten members of the group refused to answer the committee's questions, on the grounds that their right to hold and communicate whatever personal and political beliefs they wanted was protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. HUAC saw things differently, and as a result of their refusal to cooperate, the Hollywood Ten were tried in federal court and found guilty of contempt. They were each sentenced to one year in jail and fined $1,000. In addition, they were blacklisted from the movie business. For years most of them were able to eke out a living by working in the film industries of other countries, or else by using a pseudonym to continue working in Hollywood. The most famous pseudonym used by a member of the Hollywood Ten was Robert Rich, who won an Oscar in 1956 for writing The Brave One. Rich was actually the blacklisted Trumbo.

The example of the Hollywood Ten ushered in a dark period for Hollywood. Called to appear before HUAC, some three hundred witnesses from Hollywood clung to their own careers by admitting their previous communist affiliation and naming others whom they knew to have similar connections in their past. Many of the film industry's brightest stars took the high road by refusing to name names, and paid for the noble gesture with their careers, at least temporarily.

Of the original Hollywood Ten, only Dmytryk backed down and later cooperated with HUAC. He appeared a second time before the committee and named twenty-six members of left-wing groups.

Hollywood blacklisting finally subsided in the late 1950s along with the anticommunist hysteria that had gripped the entire nation. Many formerly blacklisted writers and directors were able to rebuild their careers. Trumbo was the first of the Hollywood Ten to successful resume work in Hollywood, appearing in the credits of the classic Spartacus (1960), which he adapted from the novel of the same name by fellow blacklistee Howard Fast. The climactic scene in Spartacus reflects Trumbo's own traumatic McCarthyist experience, as captured rebel slaves refuse to betray Spartacus to the ruthless Crassus. As a result, Crassus has the slaves crucified one by one.

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Source Citation "McCarthyism." Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. History: Government and Politics, Gale, 2009. Student Resources in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EJ3048400183 /SUIC?u=mcdo70496&xid=1a4e5456. Accessed 9 Aug. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ3048400183