McCarthyism

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McCarthyism

To talk about McCarthyism we must first look at what was going on in the United States at the time. WW II had just ended a few years prior, and the cold war was in full swing. Following WW II, for the US Government to be able to spend so much of the taxpayers money on the cold war, the Government had to get the US citizens behind them. To do this the US government started a propaganda campaign to scare the public into thinking the communists were bad and very dangerous people. That the communist people, their way of thinking, and their type of government had to be contained. There were several things that happened to help in-force what the government was saying. First Czechoslovakia and China fell to communism. Then the Russians had a successful explosion of an atomic bomb. There was also the arrest and conviction of the Rosenbergs as spies who were giving our atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The Korean War was also starting up, Russia was supplying the North Korean Communists with military equipment to invade the non communist South Korea (Reeves 1). With all of this going on in the world and in the United States, the stage was set for McCarthy.

In 1950 after 5 years of the cold war, a relatively unknown Senator Joseph McCarthy, delivered a speech to the Ohio Country Women's Republican Club. In this speech he talked about the spread of communism around the world. McCarthy pointed out that this was the "time of the cold war" (Chafe 50). He said that the world was split into two camps, that of communistic atheism and that of Christianity. He also says that communism is on the move and that "the chips are down-they are truly down" (Chafe 50). So he is telling these women that communists ar...

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...arthy in the beginning but the subcommittee was to slow in getting its findings out. This only helped McCarthy and gave him greater credibility. So in essence, because of this fear, people did not challenge the government on many issues, and the government went unchecked in its policies and practices.

With this kind of environment to work in you have to wonder how many things were not done. For example we know that National Health Insurance was one of the policies that got dropped (Chafe 65). You have to wonder how many other things went undone, books unwritten, movies never made, voices not heard, all because of the fear of being labeled a communist. We will never know how McCarthyism really affected the US economy, because we don't know how many ideas were not pursued. I wonder how Bill Gates would have been perceived in this environment.

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