Communism In America

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a Republican Senator from the state of Wisconsin between 1947 and 1957. Between 1950 and 1954, McCarthy became noted for unsubstantiated claims that there were Communist and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the federal government.

Beginning in the late 1940s, as the Cold War escalated between the United States, the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, the United States went through a period of intense anti-communist tensions and suspicion. Many thousands of individuals were suspected of being Soviet spies, Communists, or communist sympathizers. Although the American Communist Party was never illegal under Federal law, membership in the party or support of its goals were regarded by many as tantamount to treason. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of this era of anti-communism. The term McCarthyism was coined that same year to describe and condemn the senator's methods, which were widely seen as demagogic and based on reckless, unsubstantiated accusations. Later the term was applied more generally to the anti-communism of the late 1940s through the late 1950s; today, it is often used even more broadly, to describe public attacks made on persons' character and/or patriotism that involve the sort of tactics associated with McCarthy.

In 1948, Time magazine's managing editor Whittaker Chambers , a former Communist spy turned government informer, accused Alger Hiss of being a member of the Communist party and a spy. According to Chambers, Hiss was a member of the Ware group, an underground cell of Communists that Chambers said had engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. In August or September of 1934, Hiss met Chambers and allegedly started paying Communist Party dues. He allegedly began working with the GRU in 1935 with Chambers acting as courier. GRU Illegal Rezident (a Soviet spymaster who resides in the U.S. undercover, rather than as an embassy employee) Boris Bykov instructed Hiss in espionage procedures. These included bringing files home nightly and retyping them for later transfer to Chambers.

Hiss and his supporters pointed out that Chambers had asserted to government officials for ten years preceding 1948 that Hiss was neither a Communist nor a spy.