Anticommunism and McCarthyism Paper
Tommi Deutsch
University of Phoenix
Instructor: Roger Daene
July 26, 2010
Through the years of 1947 to 1954, there was The Red Scare. This was also known as the McCarthyism Era. This was when the United States was going through its anticommunism movement. This movement consisted of years of domestic confusion where organizations and people were tried constantly for being untrustworthy to America by any type of aid or influence of communism. McCarthyism which originates from the Republican Senator, Joseph McCarthy, greatly upset everything from the political to economic normality of this time period. This paper will only be covering the political scene of Anticommunism and McCarthyism even though it consisted of much more.
Figures show that even though there were a minority of communists and communist sympathizers in the US through out the beginning of the 1950’s, most of the individuals attended ten or fewer meetings and conferences organized by the party. In fact, attending such conferences were a popular trend in the 1930’s, and the propaganda and paranoia against the suspected mass of communist spies was not a factual and reasonable cause for the prolonged 'witch hunt'. Historians such as Richard Freeland, in The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (1971), insisted that the Democrats began the crusade to rid the government of radicals to protect themselves from Republican attacks. Likewise, authors like Nelson Polsby and Robert Griffith argued that Republicans seized the issue of communism in the government to get themselves back into power after twenty years of exclusion. The later case is directly proven by McCarthy's speech before the Republican National Convention in 1952 when he claimed, "Our job as Americans and as Republicans is to dislodge the traitors from every place where they've been sent to do their traitorous work." The Republicans, calling those two decades "twenty years of...