The Red Scare: Communist Witch Hunts
The Red Scare is a term that describe the fear of a potential rise of communists that the citizens of the United States felt back in the 1920s and 1950s. During the Red Scare, Many people were brought for questioning that will determine whether they supports the idea of communism or not and some of them who were brought for questioning were unfortunate. Those who were unfortunate lost their jobs, friends and they were also black listed from their previous jobs.
It all started when the people of the Soviet Union overthrow their royal family in 1917 and killed them in the following year. Not long after that, an Anarchist who was believed to be a Communist, assassinated president McKinley (The Red Scare in 1920). These events will eventually create an uprising of fear and a sense of suspicions among the people of the United States. During the time of fear, many of the workers in the United States went on various strikes and even though it was not necessarily have to do with communism, it seen as the main cause of the problem in the eyes of American conservatives. Though in 1919, a small radical group that believed to be a “Communist Labor Party” were formed (The Red Scare). Many Americans at that time were saying that the government had to get rid of them in order to keep the country save. Though there was one person who have a difference of an opinion with the society about the communism and that man was Mitchell Palmer. He believed that those small parties of wouldn’t do a great damage to the country and said that “No Bolshevik Revolution would happen in the United States.”. Then, he started doing “Communists Witch Hunts” where he encouraged the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate th...
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... the president. A few months after opening up Senator McCarthy and his true purpose of doing the hunts for his improvement of his political side, the Red Scare was over.
In the end, people was fearing in vain. The things that people were afraid of such as the communist infiltrating the government and taking over the nation was never happen. People ought to have a better judgement over a situation. Some people like McCarthy have to think about other people and not themselves. They got to make people’s life easier and not harder.
Works Cited
“The Red Scare in 1920” Modern World History. History Learning Site. Web. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk “The Red Scare” U.S. History Online Text Book. US History. Web. 17 Nov. 2013. http://www.ushistory.org/us/47a.asp Wall, Wendy. “Anti-Communism in the 1950s” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Web. 2007
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The red scare was a time where people were falsely accused of being communist spies, and would be sent to prison. If somebody hated their neighbor, a co-worker, or even a teacher they could just accuse them of being a communist spy. Some cases were even so severe as in the case with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were accused for stealing information on the atomic bomb and giving the information to the...
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