McCarthyism as Americans Pro and Contra at 1950s
An celebratory paper in completing the American Popular Culture course assignment
By Anisa Caesar Intan Firdausi, Rr.
November 2009
The Dominant World Power. For American liberals, the experiences of the 1950's formed their concept of the American past and contributed to the popularity of a consensus history. They came to celebrate the American past and the beneficence of American political and economic institutions. The anti-communist should be placed in their wide historical setting, the condition of American capitalism at the end of the war as it pursued its geopolitical interests at home and abroad. US imperialism and capitalism itself came out from the war as the dominant world power. As it launched the challenge contain of communism internationally, it needed as well to execute workers politically at home and make that they would not threaten its global designs.
There are some additional factors contributed to McCarthyism; extending back to the years of the First Red Scare inspired by Communism's emergence as a recognized political force and more subtle forces encouraging the rise of McCarthyism.
A fact from the new liberals, there is a fearful of being labeled radical, that further would silent their difficulty for social change. Increasingly, they stressed their confrontational anti-Communism became even more fearful of public debate and provoked public. These factors deeply influenced their view of the developing McCarthyism in early 1950's. Because liberals had come to identify the national interest and rationality of American. They are some reason why American liberal be able to accept the new ideology so uncritically, necessity and sensibility that they were ill-prepared to understand the McCarthy phenomenon that I collected from reading.
Is There Something that People Gain from this Cultural Phenomenon? Joseph McCarthy is a US senator of Republican for Wisconsin. Joseph McCarthy's interest with the current cultural phenomenon that would stand his name began with a speech he made on Lincoln Day, 9th February 1950 to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. McCarthyism born as the politically motivating practice of making claims of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. Nevertheless, McCarthyism does not misplace as it end in 1954 because the term is also now used more generally to describe reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries. Therefore McCarthyism was a period of intense anti-communism in the United States primarily from 1950 to 1954.
During this period people from all ways of life became the subject of aggressive hunts that often based on inconclusive or questionable evidence. Aggressive hunts means many thousands of Americans were accused of being Communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of forceful investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The biggest impact in summary is many people suffered loss of employment, destruction of their careers, and even imprisonment.
In fact, spying and Communist Party membership were not identical categories. From approximately 50,000 party members in the war years, only about 300 were involved in spying. Some members refused to reveal knowledge when approached for information; others used carelessness in the company they kept; while others convinced themselves that the information they leaked was intended chiefly for Communist Party leaders in New York. As the anti-celebratory of communism, most of the Americans who betrayed their country did not participate because they were blackmailed, needed money or were psychological misfits. They joined in because of a sense of belonging in anti-fascism notion, a commitment to such causes as civil rights and improvement in the lives of the working class.
A Letter that Would Change Your Live Forever. Besides produced some speech, Joseph McCarthy also produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of known Communists working for the State Department. According to Reynold Humphries in Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History, blacklisting of left-wing writers, actors, directors and producers in the American film industry as official of liberalism. Hollywood executives all played their parts, has had far-reaching consequences, not only for the film industry, but American society and culture as a whole. In 1950s Hollywood raise a host of complex issues bound up with the Second World War, postwar society in the US, American liberalism, the film industry, the Communist Party and the general problems of the American left. Communist Party members in the film industry, according to this argument, were more or less the equivalent of Soviet secret police agents. Humphries approaches certain of these information, and leaves some of the others aside (184).
Blacklists deeply affected the lives of the men and women caught up in them. More than 10,000 people may have lost their jobs. It seems that low number of thrashings administered under slavery. McCarthyism also concern to some specific sector in American society such as social, politics, and culture. The social reforms that never implemented, the diplomatic initiatives that were never taken, the workers who were never organized into unions, the book that were never written and movies that were never made. From my point of view, the condition I have mentioned before implied as the celebration mode (even it seems that they never celebrate anything) that American approach to McCarthyism. McCarthyism clearly played role in the television broadcast at that moment. The blacklist contributed to the unwillingness of the film industry with controversial social or political issues.
In addition, the nation cultural and another intellectual life also suffered. In the late 1950s a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago wanted to have a coffee-vending machine installed outside the Physics Department for the convenience of people who worked there late at night. They started to circulate a petition to the Buildings and Grounds Department, but their colleagues refused to sign. They did not want to be associated with the allegedly radical students whose names were already on the document. Since political activities could get you in trouble, prudent folk avoided them. Instead, to the despair of intellectuals, middle class Americans embraced social conformity. A silent generation of students populated the nation's campuses, while their professors shrank from teaching anything that might be construed as controversial. Meaningful political dissent had all but withered away.
The McCarthyism We Deserve! On the other side, McCarthyism was supported by a variety of groups, including the American Legion and various other anti-communist organizations. One core element of support was a variety of militantly anti-communist women's groups such as the American Public Relations Forum and the Minute Women of the U.S.A. These organized thousands of housewives into study groups, letter-writing networks, and patriotic clubs that coordinated efforts to identify and eliminate subversion. In the identification of traditional symbols of status with pro-Communism, the McCarthy followers, of non-Anglo-Saxon extraction, can gain a feeling of superiority over the traditionally honored groups. Senator McCarthy and his followers felt there was a dangerous subversive element that posed a danger to the security of the country. In January 1954, a poll found that 50% of the American public supported McCarthy, while only 29% had an unfavorable opinion of the senator. American further got attenuation of the reform impulse by diverting the attention of the labor movement as they gain from McCarthyism.
The public fighting McCarthyism occurred at June 1st 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican, delivered a speech to the Senate she called a "Declaration of Conscience". In a clear attack upon McCarthyism, she called for an end to "character assassinations" and because McCarthyism violate basic principle of US: The right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest and the right of independent thought. Elmer Davis, one of the most highly respected news reporters and commentators in 1950s, often spoke out against what he saw as the extremes of McCarthyism. On one occasion he warned that many local anti-Communist movements constituted a general attack not only on schools and colleges and libraries, on teachers and textbooks, but on all people who think and write; in short, on the freedom of the mind.
Following the war, support for the Communist Party rapidly declined. In 1956, following the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, three-quarters of U.S. Communists, including many of its most dedicated members left the party. The impact of the McCarthy era was equally apparent in the realm of international affairs. In the mid- and late 1950s, the attitudes and institutions of McCarthyism slowly weakened. Changing public sentiments had a lot to do with this the decline of McCarthyism may also be charted through a series of court decisions. The death of Joseph McCarthy in 1956 also be one of the most important factor causing the end of McCarthyism era.
In conclusion, American and American new liberals were forced to accept McCarthyism as a part of cultural and their politic lives. In this case, celebratory approach of an event or movement seems also can be forced to be accepted. Some of them followed the movement, in opposition to Communism, they join some anti-Communism organization and role the blacklist, people deserve in their McCarthyism and stand for it; others kept on their origin beliefs or did nothing because they fear of the blacklist. Argument against McCarthyism appears as reactions of violation in the human rights, this is called as the anti-McCarthyism or anti-celebratory.
Paranoids of fearing about communists, I have often found it unsettling that what the McCarthies feared in the 1950s is in some respects not so off base today. Moreover, I concerned the changes of people perspectives and public sentiments brings United States of America into the New Liberalism after McCarthyism era.
Sources
Demagogy. Wikipedia, 2009. 24 N0v. 2009
First Red Scare.______________________________
Humphries, Reynold. Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History. London: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Print.
McCarthyism. Wikipedia, 2009. 24 N0v. 2009
Rosenberg, John. Neo Anti McCarthyism. Discrimination US, 7 November 2006. Web. 24 Nov 2009.
Schrecker, Ellen. Impact of McCarthyism. Curriculum Units, 1995. Web. 24 Nov. 2009.
Theoharis, Athan. UPPEN Edu Wrinting, 31 May 2007. Web. 24 Nov 2009.
Walsh, David. The Anti-communist Purge of The American Film Industry. Wsws Articles, 4 February 2009. Web. 24 Nov. 2009.
