History of the United States II / Unit 13 USH2 1863 review, 2 to 3 minutes
McCarthy or McCarthyism
The idea
Whether the second Red Scare was McCarthy's work or a broader politics he gave a name to is the question of this entry, and the anchor's own dates answer it. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in nineteen thirty-eight, twelve years before McCarthy's speech at Wheeling. Truman's loyalty program began in nineteen forty-seven, three years before it, and Digital History says executive loyalty inquiries began as early as nineteen forty-one. Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss before HUAC in nineteen forty-eight, with Richard Nixon pressing the case, and the blacklist was already destroying careers in the nineteen forties.
In practice
The Yawp's count of over one hundred congressional investigations of subversion between nineteen forty-nine and nineteen fifty-four, and McCarthy making common cause with religious anti-Communists.
Where people slip
The anti-Communist politics of those years crossed party lines. The Yawp describes a liberal anti-communism: the Taft-Hartley Act gave union officials the initiative to purge Communists from the labour movement, and Digital History records Walter Reuther purging Communists from the CIO. Edward R. Murrow said McCarthy did not create the fear; he merely exploited it. Two misreadings sit on either side. The first makes McCarthy the whole story, so that his censure in nineteen fifty-four ended the Red Scare; the loyalty program, HUAC and the blacklist were older than his campaign, and the same Congress that censured him had passed the Communist Control Act in August nineteen fifty-four, which the Yawp says effectively criminalised party membership. The second makes him incidental; the Yawp records twenty million people watching the hearings that ended his career. The course's position follows the anchor's dates: McCarthy gave a name and a face to a politics older and broader than he was.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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