Joseph Raymond Mccarthy

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was born on November 14th, 1908, in Chute, Wisconsin. Living a fairly normal childhood, he would graduate from Marquette University in 1935 with a bachelor degree in law. McCarthy practiced law for four years, but stopped when he was elected to public office for the first time in 1939. Serving as a circuit court judge, his job was mostly unimportant work. However, the political and judicial knowledge he earned here would be necessary for his later life. By 1942, though, World War II had been raging for about three years, and McCarthy felt an obligation to serve. In July of that year, he would leave this job to join the Marines. Serving as a tail gunner, he would eventually rise to the rank of Captain. While he was still

This is because, in reality, anti-communist ideologies had existed in the United States for quite some time. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, which was an ally of the United States, had gained a large amount of land in Central and Eastern Europe. At the time, the president of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, had promised to allow these occupied countries to hold their own elections. Over time, though, it became clear that this was not going to happen. Instead, Stalin and other high-ranking Soviet officials began to emphasize their desire to spread communism throughout all of these countries, then the rest of the world. Though this was clearly just political propaganda, some more extreme Americans, such as Joseph McCarthy, took these claims seriously, and feared for their own country. This smaller fear, however, quickly turned into a nationwide panic in 1949, when the Soviet Union finally succeeded at exploding their first atomic bomb. Later that year, the American political system dove even further into nervousness when the communist-party claimed victory in the Chinese civil-war, leading to Mao Zedong taking power. With many fearing that a communist-American war was imminent, the United States became fertile ground for someone such as McCarthy to spread his

Much like Joseph McCarthy, Abigail Williams, the antagonist of the play, uses the fear of others to her advantage. Using accusatory speeches filled with false information to her advantage, Abigail gained a large amount of power in her town. Bringing random citizens to trials which she knew they could not escape, she had many people convicted of crimes they did not commit in order to serve her own agenda. She was also only taken seriously for so long because people feared what the repercussions would be if they spoke out against her. Much like how McCarthy was censured after trying to challenge the U.S. army, Abigail was also taken down when she got too in over her head, and challenged the mayor’s wife of another town. Similar to McCarthy, she was never taken seriously again, and lived quietly for the rest of her