Mccarthyism Red Scare

Vivian Gonzalez Mr. Martinez-Ramos A.P. United States History May 3, 2000 McCarthyism was one of the saddest events of American history. It destroyed people's lives and shattered many families. It threw innocent people into a whirlwind of mass confusion and fictional portrayals of their lives. McCarthyism spawned for the country's new found terror of Communism known as the red scare. McCarthyism was an extreme version of the red scare, a scare whose ends did not justify the means. The Red Scare happened twice in the history of this great country. When the communist took over Russia in 1919, the American people were unnerved. They were afraid of a communist take over in the states. When the First World War ended in 1918, there was still an ideological
They worked much in the same right as Palmer, as far as unconstitutional practices were concerned. "American Foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian Foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto." Before the War no legislation regarding communism was passed by congress. So workers in Unions were legally allowed to be Communists. A bill in Congress, called the Taft-Hartley Act, passed the first restriction on people entering the Unions in 1947. One provision stated that a worker must swear that he is not, and was not a communist, before entering a Union. The politicians were going to great lengths to keep this country an anti-communist and anti Russia society. They also set up a series of laws to keep every politician in American anti-communist. One could not run for office during the Red Scare, unless one was on the record a self-professed Russian hater. The paranoia was everywhere. "There are today many Communists in America. They are everywhere – In factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private
"The government is full of Communists. We can hammer away at them." And so it was that in February of 1950 McCarthy was interviewed by the Wheeling Intelligencer a newspaper in West Virginia. The next day Senator McCarthy's startling words were published in the paper. "I have I my hand a list of 205 that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department The real number of people of whom any investigation was done was eighty-one The speech produce one of many controversies over McCarthy, partially because there was not a single consistent copy of the speech. The argument started because of the indistinct number in McCarthy's speech. At his next speech, in Salt Lake City, he claimed that he had said 57. However, there is now considerable evidence that he alleged 205 in Wheeling. On February 20, the number came out to be eighty-one in the Senate. "He took six hours, from the late afternoon to just before midnight, explaining in detail a number of cases of supposed Communists in the State Department." But, his lengthy speech had countless defects: "Cases 15, 27, 37 and 59 simply never showed up; he skipped them entirely.... Cases 1 and 2 and several others worked for the United