The McCarthy era with its witch hunts of suspected “Communists” in the United States is a topic about which I have a general idea but about which I don’t have detailed knowledge. In general, I understand that during this period, Americans suspected of having Communist or Socialist leanings were investigated by an un-American activities committee, made a note of, and somehow persecuted. But what exactly was the extent of such persecution, and how close did it get to the kind of persecution that would happen to politically undesirable people in a totalitarian state? So in an actual Communist or Fascist state, you can’t say whatever you want. My family is from such a country (the former Jugoslavia), and for example my grandfather was briefly jailed and he and my grandmother then had to move from one town to another, because of a small comment he made suggesting he was pro-Soviet at the time when Jugoslavia, while Communist, was moving away from the Soviet sphere of influence. He was lucky. Other people ended up on Goli Otok, an awful island gulag. Did McCarthyism come anywhere close to this kind of persecution, and to what extent did it infringe on people’s constitutional rights? I know that there was some kind of agreement between the government and Hollywood, where people would be blacklisted for suspected Communist leanings (I believe animator Gene Deitch was affected to some extent by this, and for example, Pete Seeger, who was a Socialist, was not allowed to perform in many places, Oberlin College being an exception. But neither were jailed, nor were their careers ultimately destroyed), but was anyone actually subjected to straight-out government oppression as in a totalitarian state? So for example:
Was any suspected Communist/Socialist detained and forced to participate in interrogations by the CIA, FBI, etc.?
Were there any people who ended up in jail due to “Communist”-related leanings or activities?
In general, if an American citizen went around in the 1950s openly saying they were a Communist, could that result in them being deprived of actual civil liberties?
My understanding is that it wasn’t just confined to the House Committee and McCarthy’s Senate Committee, but also knock-on/copycat activities by other local bodies, which could see schoolteachers/librarians and the like lose their jobs, in the way some people in Hollywood were blacklisted and couldn’t get work, at least in their real names. And I think some number had their passports withdrawn. I’d guess too that publicity for allegations may have led to social ostracism and the then equivalent of today’s social media pile-on.
It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthyism. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.
The repression in the US, Canada, and Western Europe was no Stalinist repression/gulag/famine, but it was no shining moment for truth, justice, and democracy, either. And “Not Stalinism!” is a pretty low bar. PatrickLondon is correct, people all over North America lost jobs. There was also an accompanying “Pink Scare,” that is, a crackdown on homosexuals, that saw many kicked out of government jobs as “security risks.” The twisted logic was they could be easily blackmailed by the “Reds” because they were homosexuals and could lose their jobs if their employers found out…
The Red Scare also needs to be put into the context of anti-civil rights actions by law enforcement at every level.
True but what they did (as in conspiring with a murderous foreign dictatorship to give away details of an ultra secret weapon of mass destruction) went WAY beyond “having socialist-minded beliefs”.
They didn’t deserve the death penalty because they weren’t the people who made sure Stalin got the bomb. They were a small cog in a much larger espionage machine.
You’re right about their actions being more than having socialist beliefs, but if they had not had such beliefs, it is extremely unlikely they would have been executed. And it is a stretch to think Western cold warriors were motivated by a distaste/dislike for murderous foreign dictatorships, given how many they propped up and encouraged
There were indeed real spies and agents of influence. But people who were overtly signed-up party members or supporters of fellow-travelling causes/organisations usually weren’t, were no effective threat, and pursuing them was a massive side-show to, even a distraction from, any serious counter-intelligence activity.
Sometimes you only had to be associated with someone.
Lt. Milo Radulovich was discharged from the Air Force because his father and sister were considered to be security risks. His father, an immigrant from Yugoslavia, subscribed to Serbian publications which were considered Communist. His sister was involved in liberal causes, but insisted she was not political. There were never any accusations about the loyalty of Radulovich himself.
In 1954 my HS English teacher was called to testify at HUAC. Next thing I knew I had a new English teacher. Several years later, however, I read that he had sued and won his job back and all his back pay. I guess that cost the school board a pretty penny.
IIRC from what I read about it, a lot of the “arrest” was either connections with people committing espionage (or suspected of…) or lying to HUAC. Nixon famously (presciently) is quoted about “it’s not the crime it’s the coverup that gets you” referring to testimony about whether Alger Hiss has been part of a group of communist spies which earned Hiss a perjury conviction.
In response to Chambers’s accusations, Hiss protested his innocence and insisted on appearing before HUAC to clear himself. Testifying on August 5, 1948, he denied having ever been a communist or having personally met Chambers. Under fire from President Truman and the press, the Committee was reluctant to proceed with its investigation against so eminent a man. Congressman Richard Nixon, however, who later described Hiss’s demeanor that day as, “insolent”, “condescending”, and “insulting in the extreme”, wanted to press on.
The grand jury charged Hiss with two counts of perjury —it did not indict him for espionage since the statute_of_limitations had run out. Chambers was never charged with a crime. Hiss went to trial twice. The first trial, presided over by Judge Samuel Kaufman, started on May 31, 1949, and ended in a hung jury on July 7. Chambers admitted on the witness stand that he had previously committed perjury several times while he was under oath, including deliberately falsifying key dates in his story.
So the HUAC activities were far too deep and went too far, and basically tarred and feathered anyone who had expressed communist views anytime before, whether they recanted or not. But there were definitely Stalinist spy rings operating in the USA, and Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs had been part of them.
(The analysis I read of the Rosenberg trial was - the feds tried to pressure Rosenberg to flip on the espionage ring; they threatened to charge his wife as a spy also. She’d been a low level participant, typing up assorted documents etc. The penalty for espionage was death, so they figured Julius would reveal all the gory details of his fellow spies, rather than see his wife executed.
I believe execution was not the only penalty for espionage but the government made it clear it would seek the death penalty for the reason noted above. Certainly later cases of much greater espionage have not led to executions. As for the Soviet spy rings, of course they existed, just as western agencies operated in the Soviet Union and actually organized coups in Iran, Guatemala, etc. Not arguing for a US/USSR moral equivalency here, but on the matter of espionage, governments pointing fingers can get a little hypocritical.
Yeah, I’m quoting the future, because it’s a better way to put it
Basically, you had the 1950 version of “cancel culture” with the aggravating effect that it was given official sanction from the top and it could really ruin you. And on top of it you did not even have alternate social media to run a counter-narrative: respectable clean people who could push back were advised to keep their heads down or else.
A good point - the presumption and “messaging” was that everyone who did not like how the system was organized had to be a commie agent. Not that there were agents in the ranks or that there was support from the communist/socialist movements, but that by definition these entities were communist-inspired subversives.
But Stalin took it a step beyond. We’ve all heard a theremin played, it makes that weird music that, for example, is part of the opening theme of the original Star Trek series. The guy who invented the Theremin, whose name escapes me, was kidnapped by Soviet agents and sent back to Moscow. I also recall reading an interview with someone whose mother was a sailor who jumped ship in Seattle. She was tracked down by the KGB after he was born and kidnapped back to Russia. Trotsky, of course, managed to not be kidnapped. (For a really good example of Stalin’s tactics, George Orwell describes how he was in the wrong socialist faction in Spain, so in the middle of a civil war while Barcelona was about to be overrun, the KGB found it more appropriate to purge competing factions on the same side.)
The McCarthy hearings were a result of the paranoia surrounding the fact that well-meaning socially conscious Americans were duped (or volunteered) to front for Moscow and infiltrate the government. Moscow toadies exploited people’s legitimate social concerns and lure them into being radical. Not sure how the west worked in the USSR, but the paranoia came from the fact that the west did not have the level of thought control and intrusive oversight over its people, so suddenly realized they had a bigger problem. It was an adjustment from being allies in WWII to return to the basic paranoia about the communists’ stated goal to violently overthrow the established order.
The most egregious part of the HUAC hearings was a simple and nasty one. People were brought forth to testify about their earlier political activities. They were expected to name names of anyone else they knew of who might also have shared their political leanings at one time. It was a multiple dilemma; be a snitch and identify everyone, not mention some people and get sent to jail for perjury, or refuse to answer and get sent to jail for contempt. (Luckily we don’t send people to jail nowadays for contempt of congress, it seems).
And as others mentioned, whether you spilled your guts or not, simply the suggestion of being associated with communism was enough to get someone fired, or in the case of Hollywood, blacklisted.
We cannot be too glib about the detailed history, but I suspect the crackdown on “commie agents” was really aimed at, not spies, but people with dangerous radical beliefs like labour unionists and the ilk.
PS the Communist Control Act did make being a communist a crime punishable by actual fines and jail time, but how many people had to pay those penalties before it was ruled blatantly unconstitutional?
In the west, the Cold War was in part designed to roll back gains working people had made during and after the war, including their success in creating social welfare. It was also a PR strategy for the post-war “military industrial complex.” At same time, the idea that 1/3-1/2 and even more of the world, including the “Third World” could go “commie” and thus keep the west out of significant markets and resources figured into strategies and tactics on the home front, including firing people who expressed leftish beliefs to “encourage the others.”