McCarthyism versus the Salem Witch Trials

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Many people in this world are accused of crimes so absurd that when put to trial, they name others of the same crime to redirect the focus from them to others like it happens in the actual day, every year, with minor cases. McCarthyism was one of those cases that changed history, likewise the Salem Witch Trials. McCarthyism had the same effect on people, people who were accused of communism blame others to lessen their penalty like in the Salem Witch Trials, so how the Salem Witch Trials and the McCarthy Era can connects although the great difference in time?

Joseph McCarthy was a United States senator in the mid twentieth century who believed that the communists were taking over the State Department and were shaping the foreign policy of America, those same communist that were their foes. Joseph McCarthy’s great fear of the rising of the communist party, in both the Soviet Union and in America, was reflected by a great deal of the country. “The fall of China to communism were the results of the infiltration of communism in to the American government, specially the state department” (The Annals of America).

Almost instantly after the end of World War Two, the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union began to tear away at the thin bond formed by the two counties' alliance in the war. McCarthy and many other republican politicians believed that the democratic party, along with President Harry S. Truman, were not harsh enough on the communist party and they strongly opposed Roosevelt's New Deal. When the Republicans took control of the presidency in 1952, "McCarthyism," as it is now known. This new movement, McCarthyism, accused some Americans of being communist’s sympathizers and people that were suspected o...

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...rials were around to give reasons for unexplainable things, while the McCarthyism trials were around to blame others for the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb and the fear it struck to the Americans. The trials existed for personal gain of others, because of fear of others, and fear of unexplainable things. The world still looks to blame groups of individuals rather than to accept the blame upon themselves like everything from apartheid in Africa and the constant turmoil in Bosnia to the civil rights movements in the United States.

“The democratic label is now the property of men and women who have been unwilling to recognize evil or who bent to whispered pleas from the lips of traitors

… Men and women who wear the political label stitched with the idiocy of a Truman, rotted by the deceit of an Acheson, corrupted by the Red slime of a White.”

(Joseph R. McCarthy)

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