Mccarthyism And The Red Scare Essay

Throughout the history of the United States of America, Americans have been very proud of their style of government and against anything that infringed upon their rights. Those beliefs were displayed heavily during The Red Scare. The Red Scare was, simply put, the fear of communistic ideas flowing into the United States of America and infiltrating the brains of Americans. Surely, Americans would respond in various ways to this, which begs the question: how did The Red Scare affect the United States of America? The Red Scare originated during World War I. This happened after Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which was a revolution to change the style of government that Russia had at the time. Americans grew fearful of communism and acts of anarchy

In 1949, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb and Mao Zedong's communistic forces took over China. Just a year after that, the Korean War had begun. All of this was just showing the American people that communism is spreading all around the world. This would be the time that would become to be the height of the Red Scare, specifically when Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a speech in which he said he knew of 205 members of the Communist Party that worked for the United States Department of State, this began the era that is known as The McCarthy Era. The McCarthy era was a time in which Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activites Committee essentially hunted down communists, monitoring citizens and their behavior. This led to even more public fear and hysteria over communists, and of course, dozens of

This argument is from We Do Not Ask You to Condone This: How the Blacklist Saved Hollywood which is a piece from the Cinema Journal – 39, written by Jon Lewis. He begins by saying one of the major changes to Hollywood post-blacklisting is that, for the most part, films do not show any political leaning or affiliation. He then references a Gallup Poll released November 29, 1947, which states “Do you think the Hollywood writers who refused to say whether or not they were members of the Communist Party should be punished or not?”15 He says the results were “Forty-Seven percent said that they should be punished, thirty-nine percent said that they should not be punished, and fourteen percent had no opinion.”16 Continuing off of that, Lewis goes on to say that the suspicions of communists in Hollywood and the poll had affected the Screen Actor's Guild, as he says, “ From the start, SAG's success with studio management was tied directly to the box office clout of its celebrity leadership.”17 He continues on saying that the SAG (Screen Actor's Guild) was particularly affected and began to interact with the public in order to defend Hollywood, “As SAG became less and less useful to star actors in their negotiations with studio management, star actors used SAG to promote better public relations, joining