Red Scare and McCarthy

The rise of the Red Scare, McCarthy, and McCarthyism as a whole, was due to a combination of the secrecy of the Communist Party, the misinformation about the party spread by McCarthyism’s proponents, and the extremely aggressive tactics McCarthy himself adopted. Red Scare as a whole gained prominence because Communism was a secretive new movement that Americans knew little about, its associations with Stalinism, and the actual Russian spies in the country. The movement known as McCarthyism started as a response to the Red Scare soon after World War II and was an attempt by various government officials to find Communists in America and then get those Communists removed from the country by any means necessary. The government’s problem was that their overzealousness often led to subversion of the law and American Constitution, mistaken accusations, and false convictions of people who were not Communists. McCarthy himself contributed by fundamentally changing the tactics of the movement to be much more vigorous and allowing other people who shared his extremist beliefs to take positions within the movement.

The first reason Americans began fearing the Communist party, is due to the party’s association with Russia and Stalinism. Russia was the most widely known Communist state in the world and the American Communist party’s adoration of it was the best-known thing about them . This became a large problem for the American Communist party when Stalin became a terrifying figure to the average American as knowledge of his atrocities and betrayals began to leak past the Iron Curtain. While most of the American Communists “just didn’t believe” these rumours, the average person did, and they did not see a difference between the American C...

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...uman, who used committee and legislation to try to root out the Communists that they thought were working for Government office. When McCarthy took over he radically expanded the scope of the Communist witch-hunt and enabled other people who shared his extremist beliefs to take over as well. The Red Scare itself gained power due to its association with Stalin and Russia, the large amounts of misinformation and secrecy shrouding the Communist party, as well as the fact that there actually were Communist spies in the nation such as Alger Hiss or Julius Rosenberg. McCarthy himself left the public stage after 1954 televised debate an opponent called him out with “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”. With his methodology and lack of empathy exposed to the American people, McCarthy became a pariah politically and soon faded into obscurity, dying of alcoholism in 1957 .