The idea was not to fight a war with the Soviets, but rather to keep them from extending their existing boundaries. American leaders believed that the Soviets were determined to impose its beliefs and control on the rest of the world. After the Soviets developed an atomic bomb with the help of information stolen from the U. This culminated in the execution of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two former communists, in Other people, only accused of being communists, lost their jobs.
Although these hunts for American communists, called McCarthyism, had waned by the mids, the term "communist" was applied to Civil Rights protesters and others who sought social change in America. Read how McCarthyism ended. Contact us: info tn4me. This period saw the renewal of FBI spying, the adoption of loyalty oaths for teachers and a political litmus test for federal employees, and passage of the first peacetime sedition law since But as the war ended and the alliance frayed, a series of events fanned the banked embers of anti-Communism into flames.
In the spring of , acting on orders from Moscow, US Communists reversed their policy of reconciliation with the West and adopted a militantly anti-capitalist stance. Meanwhile, authorities in the United States and Canada uncovered evidence of Soviet espionage, evidence that suggested Americans had been involved in passing classified secrets. Finally, Republicans and some conservative Democrats saw in anti-Communism a powerful campaign issue and a weapon that could be used to curb union and civil rights activism and New Deal policies.
To fend off such attacks from the right—and to build domestic support for his Cold War foreign policy—President Truman in March issued an executive order creating a Federal Loyalty-Security Program.
In practice, people could lose their jobs for being on the wrong mailing list, owning suspect books or phonograph records, or associating with relatives or friends who were politically suspect. Those accused almost never learned the source of the allegations against them, and the criteria for dismissal were expanded in and again in Tens of thousands of federal employees—including disproportionate numbers of civil rights activists and gays—were fully investigated under the loyalty-security program, and some were dismissed between and By legitimizing the use of political litmus tests for employment, the federal loyalty-security program paved the way for the use of similar political tests by state and local governments and private employers.
Between the late s and the early s, school systems, universities, movie studios, social welfare agencies, ports, companies with defense contracts, and many other employers used background checks, loyalty oaths, and other means to weed out employees deemed politically undesirable. In October of that year, the committee was catapulted back into the headlines after years in obscurity when it launched an investigation of communist influences in the film industry.
HUAC summoned a dazzling array of actors, screenwriters, and directors to testify at public hearings, asking them about their own involvement with the party and pressing them to name others with Communist ties. These blacklists persisted into the early s. Meanwhile, HUAC went on the road, holding hearings in cities across the US over the course of the next decade and investigating teachers, musicians, union organizers, and other groups.
HUAC also inspired others. The Red Scare was well underway by the end of , but a series of events in late and fed the anti-communist frenzy. In September Americans learned that the Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb, years earlier than most experts had thought possible. Many Americans thought that only a fifth column working to undermine the US from within could explain this series of setbacks.
Such fears were reinforced by several high-profile spy cases. In , Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was accused of passing secrets to the Soviet Union during the s; the statute of limitations for treason had run out, but a jury convicted Hiss of perjury.
This agitation has recently reached the United States…, and has brought under its delusions the subject of African slavery in the Southern States. It is of the family of communism, it is the doctrine of Proudhon, that property is a crime. Anyone involved in creating one of those textbooks grew up in a time when Marxists were the Bad Guys and people who questioned that got in trouble.
You might not know it from the history books, but American communism has always been racialized. When Jim Crow laws banned interracial organization, the Communist Party was the only group that dared to flout the rule.
Mandela, in addition to being a hero to American liberals, was most likely a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party. David Simon is planning a series about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—American leftists who fought against fascism in Spain.
Hollywood might even bring it to us first. Malcolm Harris is a writer and an editor at The New Inquiry.
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