The Cold War and American Society

A New Red Scare

The Red Scare was a period of intense fear of communism and communist subversion in the United States during the Cold War.
It was fueled by rumors and accusations of Communists in the U.S. and Communist infiltration of the government. The fear was that Communists were trying to take over the world.
The Red Scare began in September 1945 when Igor Gouzenko, a clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, defected and carried documents revealing a massive Soviet effort to infiltrate organizations and government agencies in Canada and the United States to obtain information about the atomic bomb.
The Gouzenko case implied that spies had infiltrated the American government, leading to a general fear of Communist subversion.
Subversion is the effort to weaken a society secretly and overthrow its government.

The Loyalty Review Program

In early 1947, President Truman established a loyalty review program to screen all federal employees.
This action seemed to confirm fears that Communists had infiltrated the government and helped to increase the fear of communism sweeping the nation.
Between 1947 and 1951, over 6 million federal employees were screened for their loyalty, a term difficult to define.
A person might become a suspect for reading certain books, belonging to various groups, traveling overseas, or even seeing certain foreign films.
About 14,000 employees were subject to scrutiny by the FBI.
Around 2,000 employees quit their jobs during the check, many under pressure.
Another 212 were fired for “questionable loyalty,” although no actual evidence against them was uncovered.

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was formed in 1938 to investigate both Communist and Fascist activities in the United States.
In 1947, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover urged HUAC to hold public hearings on Communist subversion to expose not just Communists but also “Communist sympathizers” and “fellow travelers.”
Under Hoover’s leadership, the FBI sent agents to infiltrate groups suspected of subversion and wiretapped thousands of telephones.

Hollywood on Trial

One of HUAC’s first hearings in 1947 focused on the film industry as a powerful cultural force that Communists might manipulate to spread their ideas and influence.
HUAC’s interviews routinely began, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”
Ronald Reagan, then head of the Screen Actors Guild, testified that there were Communists in Hollywood.
Ten screenwriters, known as the “Hollywood Ten,” used their Fifth Amendment right to protect themselves from self-incrimination and refused to testify.
The incident led producers to blacklist, or agree not to hire, anyone who was believed to be a Communist or who refused to cooperate with the committee.
In 1950, a pamphlet called Red Channels was published, listing 151 blacklisted actors, directors, broadcasters, and screenwriters.
The blacklist created an atmosphere of distrust and fear.

Alger Hiss

In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a TIME magazine editor and former Communist Party member, testified to HUAC that several government officials were also former Communists or spies.
The most prominent official named by Chambers was Alger Hiss, a diplomat who had served in Roosevelt’s administration, attended the Yalta conference, and taken part in organizing the United Nations.
After Hiss sued him for libel, Chambers testified before a grand jury that, in 1937 and 1938, Hiss had given him secret documents from the State Department.
Hiss denied being either a spy or a member of the Communist Party and denied ever having known Chambers.
Representative Richard Nixon of California convinced his colleagues to continue the hearings to determine whether Hiss or Chambers had lied.
Chambers produced copies of secret documents, along with microfilm that he had hidden in a hollow pumpkin on his farm.
These “pumpkin papers,” Chambers claimed, proved Hiss was lying.
A jury agreed and convicted Hiss of perjury, or lying under oath.

The Rosenbergs

Another sensational spy case centered on accusations that American Communists had sold the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviets.
In 1950, the hunt led to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a New York couple who were members of the Communist Party.
The government charged them with heading a Soviet spy ring.
The Rosenbergs denied the charges but were condemned to death for espionage.
Many people believed that they were not leaders or spies but victims caught up in the wave of anti-Communist frenzy.
Appeals, public expressions of support, and pleas for clemency failed, and the couple was executed in June 1953.

Project Venona

In 1946, American and British cryptographers, working for a project code-named “Venona,” cracked the Soviet spy code of the time, enabling them to read approximately 3,000 messages between Moscow and the United States collected during the Cold War.
The messages collected using Project Venona confirmed extensive Soviet spying and an ongoing effort to steal nuclear secrets.
The government did not reveal Project Venona’s existence until 1995.
The Venona documents provided strong evidence that the Rosenbergs were indeed guilty.

The Red Scare Spreads

Following the federal government’s example, many state and local governments, universities, businesses, unions, churches, and private organizations began their own efforts to find Communists.
The University of California required its 11,000 faculty members to take loyalty oaths and fired 157 who refused to do so.
Many Catholic groups became strongly anti-Communist and urged their members to identify Communists within the Church.
The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to take oaths that they were not Communists, but many union leaders did not object. Instead, they launched their own efforts to purge Communists from their organizations.
The president of the CIO called Communist sympathizers “skulking cowards” and “apostles of hate.”
The CIO eventually expelled 11 unions that refused to remove Communist leaders from their organization.

McCarthyism

In 1949, the Red Scare intensified further when the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb, and China fell to communism.
Many Americans believed that Communists had infiltrated the government and remained undetected.
In February 1950, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy made a surprising statement, claiming to have a list of 205 members of the Communist Party working in the State Department.
McCarthy did not provide any evidence to support his accusation, but it helped him win the election.
McCarthy continued to proclaim that Communists were a danger both at home and abroad.
He accused Democratic Party leaders of corruption and of protecting Communists.
He accused Secretary of State Dean Acheson of being incompetent and a tool of Stalin.
He also wildly accused George C. Marshall of disloyalty as a member of “a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such ventures in the history of man.”

The McCarran Act

In 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act, usually called the McCarran Act.
The act made it illegal to “combine, conspire, or agree with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to . . . the establishment of a totalitarian government.”
The McCarran Act required all Communist Party and “Communist-front” organizations to publish their records and register with the United States attorney general.
Communists could not have passports to travel abroad and, in cases of a national emergency, Communists and Communist sympathizers could be arrested and detained.
Truman vetoed the bill, but Congress easily overrode his veto in 1950.
Later Supreme Court cases, however, limited the scope of the McCarran Act.

McCarthy’s Tactics

After the Republicans won control of Congress in 1952, McCarthy became chairman of the Senate subcommittee on investigations.
Using the power of his committee to force government officials to testify about alleged Communist influences, McCarthy turned the investigation into a witch hunt.
His tactic of damaging reputations with vague and unfounded charges became known as McCarthyism.
McCarthy’s sensational accusations drew the attention of the press, which put him in the headlines and quoted him widely.
When he questioned witnesses, McCarthy would badger them and then refuse to accept their answers.
People were afraid to challenge him for fear of becoming targets themselves.

McCarthy’s Downfall

In 1954, McCarthy began to look for Soviet spies in the United States Army.
During weeks of televised Army-McCarthy hearings, millions of Americans watched McCarthy question and bully officers, harassing them about trivial details and accusing them of misconduct.
His popular support began to fade.
McCarthy brought up the past of a young lawyer in Welch’s firm who had been a member of a Communist-front organization while in law school.
Welch responded that McCarthy had no sense of decency.
The Senate passed a vote of censure, or formal disapproval, against McCarthy.
Although he remained in the Senate, McCarthy had lost all influence.
He died in 1957.

Watkins v. United States, 1957

In 1954, labor organizer John Watkins testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
He agreed to discuss his own connections with the Communist Party and to identify people he knew who were still members, but he refused to give information about those who were no longer members.
Watkins received a misdemeanor conviction for refusing to answer questions “pertinent to the question under inquiry.”
In 1957, he appealed his case to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court held that the activities of HUAC during its investigations were, indeed, beyond the scope of the stated aims of the committee, as well as the authority of congressional powers.

Life During the Early Cold War

The Red Scare and the spread of nuclear weapons had a profound impact on American life in the 1950s.
Fear of communism and of nuclear war affected the thinking and choices of many ordinary Americans, as well as their leaders in government.
Some Americans responded by preparing to survive a nuclear attack, while others became active in politics in an effort to shape government policy.
Writers responded by describing the dangers of atomic war and the threat of communism—sometimes to convince people to take action and sometimes to protest policies they feared might lead to war.

Facing the Bomb

Already upset by the first Soviet atomic test in 1949, Americans were shocked when the Soviets again successfully tested the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb, in 1953.
The United States had tested its own H-bomb less than a year earlier.
Americans prepared for a surprise Soviet attack.
Schools set aside special areas as bomb shelters.
In bomb drills, students learned to duck under their desks, turn away from the windows, and cover their heads with their hands.
These “duck-and-cover” actions were supposed to protect them from a nuclear bomb blast.
According to experts, for every person killed outright by a nuclear blast, four more would die later from fallout, the radiation left over after a blast.
To protect themselves, some families built backyard fallout shelters and stocked them with canned food.

Popular Culture in the Cold War

Worries about nuclear war and Communist infiltration filled the public’s imagination.
Cold War themes soon appeared in films, plays, television, the titles of dance tunes, and popular fiction.
In 1953, Arthur Miller’s thinly veiled criticism of the Communist witchhunts, The Crucible, appeared on Broadway.
Matt Cvetic was an FBI undercover informant who secretly infiltrated the Communist Party in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
His story captivated magazine readers in the Saturday Evening Post in 1950 and came to movie screens the next year as I Was a Communist for the FBI.
Another suspense film, Walk East on Beacon (1951), features the FBI’s activities in an espionage case.
In 1953, television took up the theme with a series about an undercover FBI counterspy who was also a Communist Party official.
Each week, I Led Three Lives kept television viewers on edge.
Popular tunes such as “Atomic Boogie” and “Atom Bomb Baby” played on the radio.
In 1954, author Philip Wylie published Tomorrow!
This novel describes the horrific effects of nuclear war on an unprepared American city.
One of the most famous and enduring works of this period is John Hersey’s nonfiction book Hiroshima.
Not only did it make some Americans question the use of the bomb, Hiroshima also underscored the real and personal horrors of a nuclear attack.
At the same time that these fears were haunting Americans, the country was enjoying postwar prosperity and optimism.
That spirit, combined with McCarthyism, fears of Communist infiltration, and the threat of atomic attack, made the early 1950s a time of contrasts.