Chapter23.pdf

̣ CHAPTER 23 ̣

THE UNITED STATES AND THE COLDWAR

1945–1953

FOCUS QUESTIONSWhat series of events and ideological conflicts prompted the Cold War?How did the Cold War reshape ideas of American freedom?What major domestic policy initiatives did Truman undertake?What effects did the anticommunism of the Cold War have on American politics and culture?

On September 16, 1947, the 160th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, the Freedom Trainopened to the public in Philadelphia. A traveling exhibition of 133 historical documents, the train,bedecked in red, white, and blue, soon embarked on a sixteen-month tour that took it to more than300 American cities. Never before or since have so many cherished pieces of Americana—amongthem the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address—beenassembled in one place. After leaving the train, visitors were encouraged to rededicate themselves toAmerican values by taking the Freedom Pledge and adding their names to a Freedom Scroll.

The idea for the Freedom Train, perhaps the most elaborate peacetime patriotic campaign inAmerican history, originated in 1946 with the Department of Justice. President Harry S. Trumanendorsed it as a way of contrasting American freedom with “the destruction of liberty by the Hitlertyranny.” Since direct government funding raised fears of propaganda, however, the administrationturned the project over to a nonprofit group, the American Heritage Foundation, headed by WinthropW. Aldrich, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.

By any measure, the Freedom Train was an enormous success. It attracted more than 3.5 millionvisitors, and millions more took part in the civic activities that accompanied its journey, includinglabor-management forums, educational programs, and patriotic parades. Behind the scenes, however,the Freedom Train demonstrated that the meaning of freedom remained as controversial as ever.

The liberal staff members at the National Archives who proposed the initial list of documents hadincluded the Wagner Act of 1935, which guaranteed workers the right to form unions, as well asPresident Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech of 1941, with its promise to fight “freedom from want.”The more conservative American Heritage Foundation removed these documents. They also deletedfrom the original list the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which had established the principleof equal civil and political rights regardless of race after the Civil War, and FDR’s 1941 orderestablishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which Congress had recently allowed toexpire. In the end, nothing on the train referred to organized labor or any twentieth-century sociallegislation. The only documents relating to blacks were the Emancipation Proclamation, theThirteenth Amendment, and a 1776 letter by South Carolina patriot Henry Laurens criticizingslavery.

Visitors viewing historic documents aboard the Freedom Train in 1948.

Many black Americans initially voiced doubts regarding the exhibit. On the eve of the train’sunveiling, the poet Langston Hughes wondered whether there would be “Jim Crow on the FreedomTrain.” “When it stops in Mississippi,” Hughes asked, “will it be made plain / Everybody’s got aright to board the Freedom Train?” In fact, with the Truman administration about to make civil rightsa major priority, the train’s organizers announced that they would not permit segregated viewing. Inan unprecedented move, the American Heritage Foundation canceled visits to Memphis, Tennessee,and Birmingham, Alabama, when local authorities insisted on separating visitors by race. TheFreedom Train visited forty-seven other southern cities without incident and was hailed in the blackpress for breaching, if only temporarily, the walls of segregation.

Even as the Freedom Train reflected a new sense of national unease about expressions of racialinequality, its journey also revealed the growing impact of the Cold War. Originally intended tocontrast American freedom with Nazi tyranny, the train quickly became caught up in the emergingstruggle with communism. In the spring of 1947, a few months before the train was dedicated,President Truman committed the United States to the worldwide containment of Soviet power andinaugurated a program to root out “disloyal” persons from government employment. Soon, AttorneyGeneral Tom C. Clark was praising the Freedom Train as a means of preventing “foreign ideologies”from infiltrating the United States and of “aiding the country in its internal war against subversiveelements.” The Freedom Train revealed how the Cold War helped to reshape freedom’s meaning,identifying it ever more closely with anticommunism, “free enterprise,” and the defense of the socialand economic status quo.

• CHRONOLOGY •1945 Yalta conference

1946 Philippines granted independence

1947 Truman Doctrine

Federal Employee Loyalty program

Jackie Robinson integrates major league baseball

Marshall Plan

Taft-Hartley Act

Freedom Train exhibition

House Un-American Activities Committee investigates Hollywood

1948 UN adopts Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Truman desegregates military

1948–1949 Berlin blockade and airlift

1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization established

Soviet Union tests atomic bomb

People’s Republic of China established

1950 McCarthy’s Wheeling, W.V., speech

NSC-68 issued

McCarran Internal Security Act

1950–1953 Korean War

1951 Dennis v. United States

1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed for spying

1954 Army-McCarthy hearings

1955 Warsaw Pact organized

GlossaryCold WarTerm for tensions, 1945–1989, between the Soviet Union and the United States, the two majorworld powers after World War Ⅱ.containmentGeneral U.S. strategy in the Cold War that called for containing Soviet expansion; originallydevised by U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan.

ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR

The Two PowersThe United States emerged from World War Ⅱ as by far the world’s greatest power. Although mostof the army was quickly demobilized, the country boasted the world’s most powerful navy and airforce. The United States accounted for half the world’s manufacturing capacity. It alone possessedthe atomic bomb. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Roosevelt administration was determinedto avoid a retreat to isolationism like the one that followed World War Ⅰ. It believed that the UnitedStates could lead the rest of the world to a future of international cooperation, expanding democracy,and ever-increasing living standards. New institutions like the United Nations and World Bank hadbeen created to promote these goals. American leaders also believed that the nation’s securitydepended on the security of Europe and Asia, and that American prosperity required global economicreconstruction.

The only power that in any way could rival the United States was the Soviet Union, whose armiesnow occupied most of eastern Europe, including the eastern part of Germany. Its crucial role indefeating Hitler and its claim that communism had wrested a vast backward nation into modernitygave the Soviet Union considerable prestige in Europe and among colonial peoples struggling forindependence. Like the United States, the Soviets looked forward to a world order modeled on theirown society and values. Having lost more than 20 million dead and suffered vast devastation duringthe war, however, Stalin’s government was in no position to embark on new military adventures.“Unless they were completely out of their minds,” said American undersecretary of state DeanAcheson, the Russians were hardly likely to go to war with the far more powerful United States. Buthaving done the largest amount of fighting in the defeat of Hitler, the Soviet government remaineddetermined to establish a sphere of influence in eastern Europe, through which Germany had twiceinvaded Russia in the past thirty years.

The Roots of ContainmentFDR seems to have believed that the United States could maintain friendly relations with the SovietUnion once World War Ⅱ ended. In retrospect, however, it seems all but inevitable that the twomajor powers to emerge from the war would come into conflict. Born of a common foe rather thancommon long-term interests, values, or history, their wartime alliance began to unravel almost fromthe day that peace was declared.

The first confrontation of the Cold War took place in the Middle East. At the end of World War Ⅱ,Soviet troops had occupied parts of northern Iran, hoping to pressure that country to grant it access toits rich oil fields. Under British and American pressure, however, Stalin quickly withdrew Sovietforces. At the same time, the Soviets installed procommunist governments in Poland, Romania, andBulgaria, a step they claimed was no different from American domination of Latin America orBritain’s determination to maintain its own empire. But many Americans became convinced thatStalin was violating the promise of free elections in Poland that had been agreed to at the Yaltaconference of 1945.

Early in 1946, in his famous Long Telegram from Moscow, American diplomat George Kennanadvised the Truman administration that the Soviets could not be dealt with as a normal government.Communist ideology drove them to try to expand their power throughout the world, he claimed, andonly the United States had the ability to stop them. While Kennan believed that the Russians couldnot be dislodged from control of eastern Europe, his telegram laid the foundation for what becameknown as the policy of “containment,” according to which the United States committed itself topreventing any further expansion of Soviet power.

Shortly afterward, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, Britain’s former wartime prime minister WinstonChurchill declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe, partitioning the free West fromthe communist East. Churchill’s speech helped to popularize the idea of an impending long-termstruggle between the United States and the Soviets. But not until March 1947, in a speechannouncing what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, did the president officially embrace theCold War as the foundation of American foreign policy and describe it as a worldwide struggle overthe future of freedom.

The Truman DoctrineHarry S. Truman never expected to become president. Until Democratic party leaders chose him toreplace Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944, he was an undistinguished senator fromMissouri who had risen in politics through his connection with the boss of the Kansas City politicalmachine, Tom Pendergast. When he assumed the presidency after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945,Truman found himself forced to decide foreign policy debates in which he had previously playedvirtually no role.

Convinced that Stalin could not be trusted and that the United States had a responsibility to provideleadership to a world that he tended to view in stark, black-and-white terms, Truman soondetermined to put the policy of containment into effect. The immediate occasion for this epochaldecision came early in 1947 when Britain informed the United States that because its economy hadbeen shattered by the war, it could no longer afford its traditional international role. Britain had nochoice but to end military and financial aid to two crucial governments—Greece, a monarchythreatened by a communist-led rebellion, and Turkey, from which the Soviets were demanding jointcontrol of the straits linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Britain asked the United States tofill the vacuum.

The Soviet Union had little to do with the internal problems of Greece and Turkey, where oppositionto corrupt, undemocratic regimes was largely home-grown. Neither had held truly free elections. Butthey occupied strategically important sites at the gateway to southeastern Europe and the oil-richMiddle East. Truman had been told by Senate leader Arthur Vandenberg that the only way areluctant public and Congress would support aid to these governments was for the president to “scarehell” out of the American people. To rally popular backing, Truman rolled out the heaviest weaponin his rhetorical arsenal—the defense of freedom. As the leader of the “free world,” the United Statesmust now shoulder the responsibility of supporting “freedom-loving peoples” wherever communismthreatened them. Twenty-four times in the eighteen-minute speech, Truman used the words “free”and “freedom.”

Building on the wartime division of the globe into free and enslaved worlds, and invoking a far oldervision of an American mission to defend liberty against the forces of darkness, the Truman Doctrinecreated the language through which most Americans came to understand the postwar world. Morethan any other statement, a prominent senator would write, this speech established “the guiding spiritof American foreign policy.” Truman succeeded in persuading both Republicans and Democrats inCongress to support his policy, beginning a long period of bipartisan support for the containment ofcommunism. As Truman’s speech to Congress suggested, the Cold War was, in part, an ideologicalconflict. Both sides claimed to be promoting freedom and social justice while defending their ownsecurity, and each offered its social system as a model the rest of the world should follow.

While his request to Congress was limited to $400 million in military aid to two governments (aidthat enabled both Greece and Turkey to defeat their domestic foes), Truman’s rhetoric suggested thatthe United States had assumed a permanent global responsibility. The speech set a precedent forAmerican assistance to anticommunist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic,and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union. There soonfollowed the creation of new national security bodies immune from democratic oversight, such as theAtomic Energy Commission, National Security Council, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), thelast established in 1947 to gather intelligence and conduct secret military operations abroad.

The Marshall PlanThe language of the Truman Doctrine and the future it sketched of open-ended worldwideresponsibilities for the United States alarmed many Americans. “Are we to shoulder the mantle ofnineteenth-century British imperialism?” asked the San Francisco Chronicle. “Are we asking for athird world war?” But the threat of American military action overseas formed only one pillar ofcontainment. Secretary of State George C. Marshall spelled out the other in a speech at HarvardUniversity in June 1947. Marshall pledged the United States to contribute billions of dollars tofinance the economic recovery of Europe. Two years after the end of the war, much of the continentstill lay in ruins. Food shortages were widespread, and inflation rampant. The economic chaos,exacerbated by the unusually severe winter of 1946–1947, had strengthened the communist parties ofFrance and Italy. American policymakers feared that these countries might fall into the Soviet orbit.

A page from a Dutch pamphlet promoting the Marshall Plan.

The Marshall Plan offered a positive vision to go along with containment. It aimed to combat theidea, widespread since the Great Depression, that capitalism was in decline and communism thewave of the future. It defined the threat to American security not so much as Soviet military powerbut as economic and political instability, which could be breeding grounds for communism.Avoiding Truman’s language of a world divided between free and unfree blocs, Marshall insisted,“Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation,and chaos.” Freedom meant more than simply anticommunism—it required the emergence of the“political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” In effect, the Marshall Planenvisioned a New Deal for Europe, an extension to that continent of Roosevelt’s wartime FourFreedoms. As a booklet explaining the idea to Europeans put it, the aim was “a higher standard ofliving for the entire nation; maximum employment for workers and farmers; greater production.” Or,in the words of a slogan used to popularize the Marshall Plan, “Prosperity Makes You Free.”

The Marshall Plan proved to be one of the most successful foreign aid programs in history. By 1950,western European production exceeded prewar levels and the region was poised to follow the UnitedStates down the road to a mass-consumption society. Since the Soviet Union refused to participate,fearing American control over the economies of eastern Europe, the Marshall Plan further solidifiedthe division of the continent. At the same time, the United States worked out with twenty-three otherWestern nations the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which proposed to stimulatefreer trade among the participants, creating an enormous market for American goods and investment.

The Reconstruction of JapanUnder the guidance of General Douglas MacArthur, the “supreme commander” in Japan until 1948,that country adopted a new, democratic constitution and eliminated absentee landlordism so thatmost tenant farmers became owners of land. Thanks to American insistence, and against the wishesof most Japanese leaders, the new constitution gave women the right to vote for the first time inJapan’s history. (A century after the Seneca Falls convention, woman suffrage had become anintrinsic part of American understandings of freedom.) Furthermore, Article 9 of the new constitutionstated that Japan would renounce forever the policy of war and armed aggression and would maintainonly a modest self-defense force.

The United States also oversaw the economic reconstruction of Japan. Initially, the United Statesproposed to dissolve Japan’s giant industrial corporations, which had contributed so much to thenation’s war effort. But this plan was abandoned in 1948 in favor of an effort to rebuild Japan’sindustrial base as a bastion of anticommunist strength in Asia. By the 1950s, thanks to Americaneconomic assistance, the adoption of new technologies, and low spending on the military, Japan’seconomic recovery was in full swing.

The Berlin Blockade and NATO

Children in Berlin celebrate the arrival of a plane bringing supplies to counter the Sovietblockade of the city in 1948.

Meanwhile, the Cold War intensified and, despite the Marshall Plan, increasingly took a militaristicturn. At the end of World War Ⅱ, each of the four victorious powers assumed control of a section ofoccupied Germany, and of Berlin, located deep in the Soviet zone. In June 1948, the United States,Britain, and France introduced a separate currency in their zones, a prelude to the creation of a newWest German government that would be aligned with them in the Cold War. In response, the Sovietscut off road and rail traffic from the American, British, and French zones of occupied Germany toBerlin.

COLD WAR EUROPE, 1956

The division of Europe between communist and noncommunist nations, solidified by the early1950s, would last for nearly forty years.

An eleven-month airlift followed, with Western planes supplying fuel and food to their zones of thecity. When Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949, the Truman administration had won a majorvictory. Soon, two new nations emerged, East and West Germany, each allied with a side in the ColdWar. Berlin itself remained divided. Not until 1991 would Germany be reunified.

Also in 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, ending the American monopoly of theweapon. In the same year, the United States, Canada, and ten western European nations establishedthe North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), pledging mutual defense against any future Sovietattack. Soon, West Germany became a crucial part of NATO. Many Europeans feared Germanrearmament. But France and other victims of Nazi aggression saw NATO as a kind of “doublecontainment,” in which West Germany would serve as a bulwark against the Soviets while

integration into the Western alliance tamed and “civilized” German power. The North AtlanticTreaty was the first long-term military alliance between the United States and Europe since theTreaty of Amity and Commerce with France during the American Revolution. The Sovietsformalized their own eastern European alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955.

The Growing Communist ChallengeIn 1949, communists led by Mao Zedong emerged victorious in the long Chinese civil war—aserious setback for the policy of containment. Assailed by Republicans for having “lost” China(which, of course, the United States never “had” in the first place), the Truman administrationrefused to recognize the new government—the People’s Republic of China—and blocked it fromoccupying China’s seat at the United Nations. Until the 1970s, the United States insisted that theousted regime, which had been forced into exile on the island of Taiwan, remained the legitimategovernment of China.

In the wake of Soviet-American confrontations over southern and eastern Europe and Berlin, thecommunist victory in China, and Soviet success in developing an atomic bomb, the National SecurityCouncil approved a call for a permanent military buildup to enable the United States to pursue aglobal crusade against communism. Known as NSC-68, this 1950 manifesto described the Cold Waras an epic struggle between “the idea of freedom” and the “idea of slavery under the grim oligarchyof the Kremlin.” One of the most important policy statements of the early Cold War, NSC-68 helpedto spur a dramatic increase in American military spending.

The Korean WarInitially, American postwar policy focused on Europe. But it was in Asia that the Cold War suddenlyturned hot. Occupied by Japan during World War Ⅱ, Korea had been divided in 1945 into Soviet andAmerican zones. These soon evolved into two governments: communist North Korea, andanticommunist South Korea, undemocratic but aligned with the United States. In June 1950, theNorth Korean army invaded the south, hoping to reunify the country under communist control. NorthKorean soldiers soon occupied most of the peninsula. Viewing Korea as a clear test of the policy ofcontainment, the Truman administration persuaded the United Nations Security Council to authorizethe use of force to repel the invasion. (The Soviets, who could have vetoed the resolution, wereboycotting Security Council meetings to protest the refusal to seat communist China.)

THE KOREAN WAR, 1950–1953

As this map indicates, when General Douglas MacArthur launched his surprise landing atInchon, North Korean forces controlled nearly the entire Korean peninsula.

American troops did the bulk of the fighting on this first battlefield of the Cold War. In September1950, General Douglas MacArthur launched a daring counterattack at Inchon, behind North Koreanlines. The invading forces retreated northward, and MacArthur’s army soon occupied most of NorthKorea. Truman now hoped to unite Korea under a pro-American government. But in October 1950,when UN forces neared the Chinese border, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops intervened,driving them back in bloody fighting. MacArthur demanded the right to push north again andpossibly even invade China and use nuclear weapons against it. But Truman, fearing an all-out waron the Asian mainland, refused. MacArthur did not fully accept the principle of civilian control ofthe military. When he went public with criticism of the president, Truman removed him fromcommand. The war then settled into a stalemate around the thirty-eighth parallel, the originalboundary between the two Koreas. Not until 1953 was an armistice agreed to, essentially restoringthe prewar status quo. There has never been a formal peace treaty ending the Korean War.

More than 33,000 Americans died in Korea. The Asian death toll reached an estimated 1 millionKorean soldiers and 2 million civilians (many of them victims of starvation after American bombingdestroyed irrigation systems essential to rice cultivation), along with hundreds of thousands ofChinese troops. Korea made it clear that the Cold War, which began in Europe, had become a globalconflict.

Taken together, the events of 1947–1953 showed that the world had moved very far from the hopesfor global harmony symbolized by the founding of the United Nations in 1945. No longer did theUnited States speak of One World (the title of Wendell Willkie’s influential wartime book). Instead,the world had been divided in two. The United States now stood as the undisputed leader of whatwas increasingly known as the West (although it included Japan, where permanent Americanmilitary bases were established), or the Free World. NATO was soon followed by SEATO inSoutheast Asia and CENTO in the Middle East, forming a web of military alliances that ringed theSoviet Union and China.

Cold War CriticsIn the Soviet Union, Stalin had consolidated a brutal dictatorship that jailed or murdered millions ofSoviet citizens. With its one-party rule, stringent state control of the arts and intellectual life, andgovernment-controlled economy, the Soviet Union presented a stark opposite of democracy and “freeenterprise.” As a number of contemporary critics, few of them sympathetic to Soviet communism,pointed out, however, casting the Cold War in terms of a worldwide battle between freedom andslavery had unfortunate consequences. George Kennan, whose Long Telegram had inspired thepolicy of containment, observed that such language made it impossible to view international criseson a case-by-case basis, or to determine which genuinely involved either freedom or Americaninterests.

In a penetrating critique of Truman’s policies, Walter Lippmann, one of the nation’s most prominentjournalists, objected to turning foreign policy into an “ideological crusade.” To view every challengeto the status quo as part of a contest with the Soviet Union, Lippmann correctly predicted, wouldrequire the United States to recruit and subsidize an “array of satellites, clients, dependents andpuppets.” It would have to intervene continuously in the affairs of nations whose political problemsdid not arise from Moscow and could not be easily understood in terms of the battle betweenfreedom and slavery. World War Ⅱ, he went on, had shaken the foundations of European empires. Inthe tide of revolutionary nationalism now sweeping the world, communists were certain to play animportant role. It would be a serious mistake, Lippmann warned, for the United States to align itselfagainst the movement for colonial independence in the name of anticommunism.

Imperialism and DecolonizationWorld War Ⅱ had increased awareness in the United States of the problem of imperialism and hadled many African-Americans to identify their own struggle for equality with the strivings of non-white colonial peoples overseas. Many movements for colonial independence borrowed the languageof the American Declaration of Independence in demanding the right to self-government. LiberalDemocrats and black leaders urged the Truman administration to take the lead in promotingworldwide decolonization, insisting that a Free World worthy of the name should not includecolonies and empires. In 1946, the United States granted independence to the Philippines, a movehailed by nationalist movements in other colonies. But as the Cold War developed, the United Statesbacked away from pressuring its European allies to move toward granting self-government tocolonies like French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and British possessions like the Gold Coastand Nigeria in Africa and Malaya in Asia. Even after granting independence to India and Pakistan in1947, Britain was determined to retain much of its empire.

In practice, geopolitical and economic interests shaped American foreign policy as powerfully as theidea of freedom. But American policymakers used the language of a crusade for freedom to justifyactions around the world that had little to do with freedom by almost any definition. No matter howrepressive to its own people, if a nation joined the worldwide anticommunist alliance led by theUnited States, it was counted as a member of the Free World. The Republic of South Africa, forexample, was considered a part of the Free World even though its white minority had deprived theblack population of nearly all their rights. Was there not some way, one critic asked, that the UnitedStates could accept “the aid of tyrants” on practical grounds “without corrupting our speeches byidentifying tyranny with freedom”?

GlossaryLong TelegramA telegram by American diplomat George Kennan in 1946 outlining his views of the SovietUnion that eventually inspired the policy of containment.iron curtainTerm coined by Winston Churchill to describe the Cold War divide between western Europeand the Soviet Union’s eastern European satellites.Truman DoctrinePresident Harry S. Truman’s program announced in 1947 of aid to European countries—particularly Greece and Turkey—threatened by communism.Marshall PlanU.S. program for the reconstruction of post–World War Ⅱ Europe through massive aid toformer enemy nations as well as allies; proposed by General George C. Marshall in 1947.North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)Alliance founded in 1949 by ten western European nations, the United States, and Canada todeter Soviet expansion in Europe.NSC-68Top-secret policy paper approved by President Truman in 1950 that outlined a militaristicapproach to combating the spread of global communism.Korean WarConflict touched off in 1950 when Communist North Korea invaded South Korea; fighting,largely by U.S. forces, continued until 1953.decolonizationThe process by which African and Asian colonies of European empires became independent inthe years following World War Ⅱ.

THE COLD WAR AND THE IDEA OFFREEDOMAmong other things, the Cold War was a battle, in a popular phrase of the 1950s, for the “hearts andminds” of people throughout the world. Like other wars, it required popular mobilization, in whichthe idea of freedom played a central role. During the 1950s, freedom became an inescapable themeof academic research, popular journalism, mass culture, and official pronouncements. Henry Luce,who had popularized the idea of an American Century, explained that “freedom” was the “one wordout of the whole human vocabulary” through which Time magazine could best explain America tothe rest of the world.

The Cultural Cold War

A poster for The Red Menace, one of numerous anticommunist films produced by Hollywoodduring the 1950s.

One of the more unusual Cold War battlefields involved American culture. Under the code name“Militant Liberty,” national security agencies encouraged Hollywood to produce anticommunistmovies, such as The Red Menace (1949) and I Married a Communist (1950), and urged that filmscripts be changed to remove references to less-than-praiseworthy aspects of American history, suchas Indian removal and racial discrimination.

The Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Department emerged as unlikely patrons of the arts. Asnoted in Chapter 21, the federal government had openly financed all sorts of artistic works during the1930s. But Cold War funding for the arts remained top-secret—in part because Congress provedreluctant to spend money for this purpose, in part because Americans charged communistgovernments with imposing artistic conformity. In an effort to influence public opinion abroad, theSoviet Union sponsored tours of its world-famous ballet companies, folk dance troupes, andsymphony orchestras. To counteract the widespread European view of the United States as a culturalbackwater, the CIA secretly funded an array of overseas publications, conferences, publishinghouses, concerts, and art exhibits. And to try to improve the international image of American racerelations, the government sent jazz musicians and other black performers abroad, especially to Africaand Asia.

Works produced by artists who considered themselves thoroughly nonpolitical became weapons inthe cultural Cold War. The CIA promoted the so-called New York school of painters, led by JacksonPollock. For Pollock, the essence of art lay in the process of creation, not the final product. His“action” paintings, made by spontaneously dripping and pouring paint over large canvases, producedworks of vivid color and energy but without any recognizable subject matter. Many members ofCongress much preferred Norman Rockwell’s readily understandable illustrations of small-town lifeto Pollock’s “abstract expressionism.” Some called Pollock’s works un-American and wonderedaloud if they were part of a communist plot. In 1946, the State Department assembled a stylisticallydiverse exhibition of contemporary American paintings that it displayed in Europe and LatinAmerica to demonstrate “the freedom of expression enjoyed by artists in America.” But criticismemerged in Congress. Representative Fred Busbey of Illinois said the exhibit gave the impressionthat “the American people are despondent, broke down or of hideous shape.” The State Departmentabandoned the project and sold the works at auction.

The CIA, however, funded the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which championed the NewYork school, and helped arrange for exhibitions overseas. It hoped to persuade Europeans not onlythat these paintings demonstrated that the United States represented artistic leadership as well asmilitary power, but that such art embodied the free, individual expression denied to artists incommunist countries. Pollock’s paintings, John Cage’s musical compositions, which incorporatedchance sounds rather than a fixed score, and the “graceful freedom” of George Balanchine’s balletchoreography were all described as artistic reflections of the essence of American life.

Freedom and TotalitarianismAlong with freedom, the Cold War’s other great mobilizing concept was totalitarianism. The termoriginated in Europe between the world wars to describe fascist Italy and Nazi Germany—aggressive, ideologically driven states that sought to subdue all of civil society, including churches,unions, and other voluntary associations, to their control. Such states, according to the theory oftotalitarianism, left no room for individual rights or alternative values and therefore could neverchange from within. By 1950, the year the McCarran Internal Security Act barred “totalitarians”from entering the United States, the term had become a shorthand way of describing those on theother side in the Cold War. As the eventual collapse of communist governments in eastern Europeand the Soviet Union would demonstrate, the idea of totalitarianism greatly exaggerated the totalityof government control of private life and thought in these countries. But its widespread usereinforced the view that the greatest danger to freedom lay in an overly powerful government.

Just as the conflict over slavery redefined American freedom in the nineteenth century and theconfrontation with the Nazis shaped understandings of freedom during World War Ⅱ, the Cold Warreshaped them once again. Russia had already conquered America, the poet Archibald MacLeishcomplained in 1949, since politics was conducted “under a kind of upside-down Russian veto.”Whatever Moscow stood for was by definition the opposite of freedom, including anything to whichthe word “socialized” could be attached. In the largest public relations campaign in Americanhistory, the American Medical Association raised the specter of “socialized medicine” to discreditand defeat Truman’s proposal for national health insurance. The real-estate industry likewisemobilized against public housing, terming it “socialized housing,” similar to policies undertaken byMoscow.

The Rise of Human RightsThe Cold War also affected the emerging concept of human rights. The atrocities committed duringWorld War Ⅱ, as well as the global language of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter,forcefully raised the issue of human rights in the postwar world. After the war, the victorious Alliesput numerous German officials on trial before special courts at Nuremberg for crimes againsthumanity. For the first time, individuals were held directly accountable to the internationalcommunity for violations of human rights. The trials resulted in prison terms for many Nazi officialsand the execution of ten leaders.

The United Nations Charter includes strong language prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race,sex, or religion. In 1948, the UN General Assembly approved a far more sweeping document, theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Itidentified a broad range of rights to be enjoyed by people everywhere, including freedom of speech,religious toleration, and protection against arbitrary government, as well as social and economicentitlements like the right to an adequate standard of living and access to housing, education, andmedical care. The document had no enforcement mechanism. Some considered it an exercise inempty rhetoric. But the core principle—that a nation’s treatment of its own citizens should be subjectto outside evaluation—slowly became part of the language in which freedom was discussed.

Ambiguities of Human RightsThe American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century had introduced intointernational relations the idea of basic rights belonging to all persons simply because they arehuman. In a sense, this was the origin of the idea of “human rights”—principles so fundamental thatno government has a right to violate them. The antislavery movement had turned this idea into apowerful weapon against the legitimacy of slavery. Yet the debates over the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights revealed the tensions inherent in the idea, tensions that persist to the present day. Towhat extent do human rights supersede national sovereignty? Who has the authority to enforcehuman rights that a government is violating? The United Nations? Regional bodies like theOrganization of American States and the European Union? A single country (as the United Stateswould claim to be doing in the Iraq War that began in 2003)?

One reason for the lack of an enforcement mechanism in the Universal Declaration of Human Rightswas that both the United States and the Soviet Union refused to accept outside interference in theirinternal affairs. John Foster Dulles, an American delegate to the conference that created the UN,opposed any statement affirming human rights out of fear that it would lead to an internationalinvestigation of “the Negro question in this country.” In 1947, the NAACP did file a petition with theUnited Nations asking it to investigate racism in the United States as a violation of human rights.Conditions in states like Mississippi should be of concern to all mankind, it argued, because ifdemocracy failed to function in “the leading democracy in the world,” the prospects for democracywere weakened everywhere. But the UN decided that it lacked jurisdiction. Nonetheless, since theend of World War Ⅱ, the enjoyment of human rights has increasingly taken its place in definitions offreedom across the globe.

After the Cold War ended, the idea of human rights would play an increasingly prominent role inworld affairs. But during the 1950s, Cold War imperatives shaped the concept. Neither the UnitedStates nor the Soviet Union could resist emphasizing certain provisions of the Universal Declarationwhile ignoring others. The Soviets claimed to provide all citizens with social and economic rights,but violated democratic rights and civil liberties. Many Americans condemned the nonpolitical rightsas a step toward socialism.

Eleanor Roosevelt saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an integrated body ofprinciples, a combination of traditional civil and political liberties with the social conditions offreedom outlined in her husband’s Economic Bill of Rights of 1944. But to make it easier formember states to ratify the document, the UN divided it into two “covenants”—Civil and PoliticalRights, and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. It took until 1992 for the U.S. Congress to ratifythe first. It has never approved the second.

GlossarytotalitarianismThe term that describes aggressive, ideologically driven states that seek to subdue all of civilsociety to their control, thus leaving no room for individual rights or alternative values.

THE TRUMAN PRESIDENCY

The Fair DealWith the end of World War Ⅱ, President Truman’s first domestic task was to preside over thetransition from a wartime to a peacetime economy. More than 12 million men remained in uniform inAugust 1945. Most wanted nothing more than to return home to their families. Demobilizationproceeded at a rapid pace. Within a year, the armed forces had been reduced to 3 million. Somereturning soldiers found the adjustment to civilian life difficult. The divorce rate in 1945 rose todouble its prewar level. Others took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights (discussed in the previouschapter) to obtain home mortgages, set up small businesses, and embark on college educations. Themajority of returning soldiers entered the labor force—one reason why more than 2 million womenworkers lost their jobs. The government abolished wartime agencies that regulated industrialproduction and labor relations, and it dismantled wartime price controls, leading to a sharp rise inprices.

In the immediate aftermath of World War Ⅱ, President Truman, backed by party liberals andorganized labor, moved to revive the stalled momentum of the New Deal. Truman’s program, whichhe announced in September 1945 and would later call the Fair Deal, focused on improving the socialsafety net and raising the standard of living of ordinary Americans. He called on Congress toincrease the minimum wage, enact a program of national health insurance, and expand publichousing, Social Security, and aid to education. Truman, complained one Republican leader, was“out–New Dealing the New Deal.”

The Postwar Strike WaveIn 1946, a new wave of labor militancy swept the country. The AFL and CIO launched OperationDixie, a campaign to bring unionization to the South and, by so doing, shatter the hold of anti-laborconservatives on the region’s politics. More than 200 labor organizers entered the region, seekingsupport especially in the southern textile industry, the steel industry in the Birmingham region, andagriculture. With war production at an end, overtime work diminished even as inflation soaredfollowing the removal of price controls. The resulting drop in workers’ real income sparked thelargest strike wave in American history. Nearly 5 million workers—including those in the steel, auto,coal, and other key industries—walked off their jobs, demanding wage increases. The strike of750,000 steelworkers represented the largest single walkout in American history to that date. EvenHollywood studios shut down because of a strike of actors and other employees of the movieindustry that lasted for the better part of a year. One historian calls this period “the closest thing to anational general strike in industry in the twentieth century.”

President Truman feared the strikes would seriously disrupt the economy. When railroad workersstopped work and set up picket lines, the infuriated president prepared a speech in which hethreatened to draft them all into the army and “hang a few traitors”—language toned down by hisadvisers. The walkout soon ended, as did a coal strike after the Truman administration secured acourt order requiring the miners to return to work. To resolve other strikes, Truman appointed federal“fact-finding boards,” which generally recommended wage increases, although not enough to restoreworkers’ purchasing power to wartime levels.

The Republican ResurgenceIn the congressional elections of 1946, large numbers of middle-class voters, alarmed by the laborturmoil, voted Republican. Many workers, disappointed by Truman’s policies, stayed at home. Thiswas a lethal combination for the Democratic Party. For the first time since the 1920s, Republicansswept to control of both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, in the face of vigorous opposition fromsouthern employers and public officials and the reluctance of many white workers to join interraciallabor unions, Operation Dixie failed to unionize the South or dent the political control ofconservative Democrats in the region. The election of 1946 ensured that a conservative coalition ofRepublicans and southern Democrats would continue to dominate Congress.

Congress turned aside Truman’s Fair Deal program. It enacted tax cuts for wealthy Americans and,over the president’s veto, in 1947 passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which sought to reverse some of thegains made by organized labor in the past decade. The measure authorized the president to suspendstrikes by ordering an eighty-day “cooling-off period,” and it banned sympathy strikes and secondaryboycotts (labor actions directed not at an employer but at those who did business with him). Itoutlawed the closed shop, which required a worker to be a union member when taking up a job, andauthorized states to pass “right-to-work” laws, prohibiting other forms of compulsory unionmembership. It also forced union officials to swear that they were not communists. While hardly a“slave-labor bill,” as the AFL and CIO called it, the Taft-Hartley Act made it considerably moredifficult to bring unorganized workers into unions. Over time, as population and capital investmentshifted to states with “right-to-work” laws like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, Taft-Hartleycontributed to the decline of organized labor’s share of the nation’s workforce.

Postwar Civil RightsDuring his first term, Truman reached out in unprecedented ways to the nation’s black community.The war, as noted in the previous chapter, had inspired a new black militancy and led many whites toreject American racial practices as reminiscent of Hitler’s theory of a master race. In the yearsimmediately following World War Ⅱ, the status of black Americans enjoyed a prominence innational affairs unmatched since Reconstruction.

Part of a series of giant murals painted between 1941 and 1948 for the lobby of the RinconCenter (formerly a post office, now a shopping mall in San Francisco), this work by the artistAnton Refregier links the Four Freedoms of World War Ⅱ to a multicultural vision of Americansociety. (In Norman Rockwell’s celebrated paintings, shown in Chapter 22, all the figuresdepicted are white.)

Between 1945 and 1951, eleven states from New York to New Mexico established fair employmentpractices commissions, and numerous cities passed laws against discrimination in access to jobs andpublic accommodations. (Some of these measures addressed other racial groups besides blacks: forexample, California in 1947 repealed its laws permitting local school districts to provide segregatededucation for children of Chinese descent and those barring aliens from owning land.) A broad civilrights coalition involving labor, religious groups, and black organizations supported these measures.The NAACP, its ranks swollen during the war, launched a voter registration campaign in the South.By 1952, 20 percent of black southerners were registered to vote, nearly a sevenfold increase since

1940. (Most of the gains took place in the Upper South—in Alabama and Mississippi, the heartlandof white supremacy, the numbers barely budged.) Law enforcement agencies finally took the crimeof lynching seriously. In 1952, for the first time since record keeping began seventy years earlier, nolynchings took place in the United States. In 1946, the Superman radio show devoted severalepisodes to the man of steel fighting the Ku Klux Klan, a sign of changing race relations in the wakeof World War Ⅱ.

In another indication that race relations were in flux, the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 challenged thelong-standing exclusion of black players from major league baseball by adding Jackie Robinson totheir team. Robinson, who possessed both remarkable athletic ability and a passion for equality, hadbeen tried and acquitted for insubordination in 1944 when he refused to move to the back of a bus atFort Hood, Texas, while serving in the army. But he promised Dodger owner Branch Rickey that hewould not retaliate when subjected to racist taunts by opposing fans and players. His dignity in theface of constant verbal abuse won Robinson nationwide respect, and his baseball prowess earned himthe Rookie of the Year award. His success opened the door to the integration of baseball and led tothe demise of the Negro Leagues, to which black players had previously been confined.

To Secure These RightsIn October 1947, a Commission on Civil Rights appointed by the president issued To Secure TheseRights, one of the most devastating indictments ever published of racial inequality in America. Itcalled on the federal government to assume the responsibility for abolishing segregation and ensuringequal treatment in housing, employment, education, and the criminal justice system. Truman hailedthe report as “an American charter of human freedom.” The impact of America’s race system on thenation’s ability to conduct the Cold War was not far from his mind. Truman noted that if the UnitedStates were to offer the “peoples of the world” a “choice of freedom or enslavement,” it must“correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.”

In February 1948, Truman presented an ambitious civil rights program to Congress, calling for apermanent federal civil rights commission, national laws against lynching and the poll tax, and actionto ensure equal access to jobs and education. Congress, as Truman anticipated, approved none of hisproposals. But in July 1948, just as the presidential campaign was getting under way, Truman issuedan executive order desegregating the armed forces. The armed services became the first largeinstitution in American life to promote racial integration actively and to attempt to root out long-standing racist practices. The Korean War would be the first American conflict fought by anintegrated army since the War of Independence.

Truman genuinely despised racial discrimination. But his focus on civil rights also formed part of astrategy to win reelection by reinvigorating and expanding the political coalition Roosevelt hadcreated. With calls for federal health insurance, the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, and aid to publiceducation, the Democratic platform of 1948 was the most progressive in the party’s history. Led byHubert Humphrey, the young mayor of Minneapolis, party liberals overcame southern resistance andadded a strong civil rights plank to the platform.

The Dixiecrat and Wallace Revolts“I say the time has come,” Humphrey told the Democratic national convention, “to walk out of theshadow of states’ rights and into the sunlight of human rights.” Whereupon numerous southerndelegates—dubbed Dixiecrats by the press—walked out of the gathering. They soon formed theStates’ Rights Democratic Party and nominated for president Governor Strom Thurmond of SouthCarolina. Although his platform called for the “complete segregation of the races” and his campaigndrew most of its support from those alarmed by Truman’s civil rights initiatives, Thurmond deniedcharges of racism. The real issue of the election, Thurmond insisted, was freedom—the States’Rights Democratic Party, he declared, stood for “individual liberty and freedom, the right of peopleto govern themselves.” Truman’s plans for extending federal power into the South to enforce civilrights, Thurmond charged, would “convert America into a Hitler state.”

Also in 1948, a group of left-wing critics of Truman’s foreign policy formed the Progressive Partyand nominated former vice president Henry A. Wallace for president. Wallace advocated anexpansion of social welfare programs at home and denounced racial segregation even morevigorously than Truman. When he campaigned in the South, angry white crowds attacked him. Buthis real difference with the president concerned the Cold War. Wallace called for internationalcontrol of nuclear weapons and a renewed effort to develop a relationship with the Soviet Unionbased on economic cooperation rather than military confrontation. He announced his willingness toaccept support from all Americans who agreed with him, including socialists and communists. Theinfluence of the now much-reduced Communist Party in Wallace’s campaign led to an exodus ofNew Deal liberals and severe attacks on his candidacy. A vote for Wallace, Truman declared, was ineffect a vote for Stalin.

The 1948 CampaignWallace threatened to draw votes from Truman on the left, and Thurmond to undermine thepresident’s support in the South, where whites had voted solidly for the Democrats throughout thetwentieth century. But Truman’s main opponent, fortunately for the president, was the colorlessRepublican Thomas A. Dewey. Certain of victory and an ineffective speaker and campaigner, Deweyseemed unwilling to commit himself on controversial issues. His speeches, wrote one hostilenewspaper, amounted to nothing more than clichés: “Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full offish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.” Truman, by contrast, ran anaggressive campaign. He crisscrossed the country by train, delivering fiery attacks on theRepublican-controlled “do-nothing Congress.” Truman revived New Deal rhetoric denouncing WallStreet and charged his opponent with threatening to undermine Social Security and other New Dealbenefits. “Don’t let them take it away,” he repeated over and over.

The four-way 1948 campaign was the last before television put a premium on brief politicaladvertisements and entertaining slogans rather than substantive debate, and the last in which a fullspectrum of ideologies was presented to the American public. Virtually every public-opinion polland newspaper report predicted a Dewey victory. Truman’s success—by 303 to 189 electoral votes—represented one of the greatest upsets in American political history. For the first time since 1868,blacks (in the North, where they enjoyed the right to vote) played a decisive role in the outcome.

Thurmond carried four Lower South states, demonstrating that the race issue, couched in terms ofindividual freedom, had the potential of leading traditionally Democratic white voters to desert theirparty. In retrospect, the States’ Rights campaign offered a preview of the political transformation thatby the end of the twentieth century would leave every southern state in the Republican column. Asfor Wallace, he suffered the humiliation of polling fewer popular votes (1.16 million) than Thurmond(1.17 million). His crushing defeat inaugurated an era in which public criticism of the foundations ofAmerican foreign policy became all but impossible.

GlossaryFair DealDomestic reform proposals of the Truman administration; included civil rights legislation,national health insurance, and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, but only extensions of some NewDeal programs were enacted.Operation DixieCIO’s largely ineffective post–World War Ⅱ campaign to unionize southern workers.Taft-Hartley Act1947 law passed over President Harry Truman’s veto; the law contained a number ofprovisions to weaken labor unions, including the banning of closed shops.DixiecratsLower South delegates who walked out of the 1948 Democratic national convention in protestof the party’s support for civil rights legislation and later formed the States’ Rights Democratic(Dixiecrat) Party, which nominated Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president.

THE ANTICOMMUNIST CRUSADEFor nearly half a century, the Cold War profoundly affected American life. There would be no returnto “normalcy” as after World War Ⅰ. The military-industrial establishment created during World WarⅡ would be permanent, not temporary. The United States retained a large and active federalgovernment and poured money into weapons development and overseas bases. National securitybecame the stated reason for a host of government projects, including aid to higher education and thebuilding of a new national highway system (justified by the need to speed the evacuation of majorcities in the event of nuclear war). The Cold War encouraged a culture of secrecy and dishonesty.Not until decades later was it revealed that during the 1950s and 1960s both the Soviet and Americangovernments conducted experiments in which unwitting soldiers were exposed to chemical,biological, and nuclear weapons. American nuclear tests, conducted on Pacific islands and inNevada, exposed thousands of civilians to radiation that caused cancer and birth defects.

Cold War military spending helped to fuel economic growth and support scientific research that notonly perfected weaponry but also led to improved aircraft, computers, medicines, and other productswith a large impact on civilian life. Since much of this research took place at universities, the ColdWar promoted the rapid expansion of American higher education. The Cold War reshapedimmigration policy, with refugees from communism being allowed to enter the United Statesregardless of national-origin quotas. The international embarrassment caused by American racialpolicies contributed to the dismantling of segregation. And like other wars, the Cold War encouragedthe drawing of a sharp line between patriotic Americans and those accused of being disloyal.Containment—not only of communism but of unorthodox opinions of all kinds—took place at homeas well as abroad. At precisely the moment when the United States celebrated freedom as thefoundation of American life, the right to dissent came under attack.

A postcard promoting tourism to Las Vegas highlights as one attraction the city’s proximity to anuclear test site. Witnessing nearby atomic explosions became a popular pastime in the city.The government failed to issue warnings of the dangers of nuclear fallout, and only years laterdid it admit that many onlookers had contracted diseases from radiation.

Loyalty, Disloyalty, and American IdentityThe fear inspired by communism became a catalyst for reconsidering American identity in the mid-twentieth century. This led to some paradoxical outcomes. In public opinion polls, many Americansexpressed devotion to civil liberties while also favoring depriving communists and othernonconformists of their jobs or even citizenship. Accusations of communist activity were oftenframed as assertions that an individual had betrayed or abandoned his or her American identity.Much of the clampdown on communism fell disproportionately against people already seen asoutside the American mainstream, including Jews and other immigrants, and gay persons. As thehistorian Henry Steele Commager argued in a 1947 magazine article, the anticommunist crusadepromoted a new definition of American loyalty and identity: conformity. Anything other than“uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of America as it is,” he wrote, could now be labeledunpatriotic.

In 1952, a quota was established allowing some Japanese immigrants to become Americancitizens. Here, in the following year, hundreds take part in a naturalization ceremony in Seattle.

The relationship between communism and citizenship was codified in the McCarran-Walter Act of1952, which made it possible to revoke the citizenship and deport an American born abroad if he orshe refused to testify about “subversive” activity, joined a subversive organization, or voted in aforeign election. The first major piece of immigration legislation since 1924, it passed over Truman’sveto. Truman had appointed a Commission on Immigration, whose report, Whom Shall WeWelcome?, called for replacing the quotas based on national origins with a more flexible systemtaking into account family reunion, labor needs, and political asylum. But the McCarran-Walter Actkept the quotas in place. They would remain the basis of immigration law until 1965.

The renewed fear of immigrants sparked by the anticommunist crusade went far beyond communists.In 1954, the federal government launched a program that employed the military to invade Mexican-American neighborhoods and round up and deport undocumented aliens. It was called OperationWetback, utilizing an insulting term sometimes directed at Mexican immigrants. Within a year, some1 million Mexicans had been deported.

Dividing the world between liberty and slavery automatically made those who could be linked tocommunism enemies of freedom. Although the assault on civil liberties came to be known asMcCarthyism, it began before Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin burst onto the nationalscene in 1950. In 1947, less than two weeks after announcing the Truman Doctrine, the presidentestablished a loyalty review system that required government employees to demonstrate theirpatriotism without being allowed to confront accusers or, in some cases, knowing the charges againstthem. Along with persons suspected of disloyalty, the new national security system also targeted gaymen and lesbians who worked for the government. They were deemed particularly susceptible toblackmail by Soviet agents as well as supposedly lacking in the manly qualities needed to maintain

the country’s resolve in the fight against communism. Ironically, the government conducted an anti-gay campaign at the very time that gay men enjoyed a powerful presence in realms of culture andcommercial life being promoted as expressions of American freedom—modern art and ballet,fashion, and advertising. The loyalty program failed to uncover any cases of espionage. But thefederal government dismissed several hundred gay men and lesbians from their jobs, and thousandsresigned rather than submit to investigation.

WHO IS AN AMERICAN?

From OSCAR HANDLIN, “THE IMMIGRATION FIGHT HAS ONLYBEGUN” (1952)

Published shortly after passage of the McCarran-Walter Act, an article by Harvard historian OscarHandlin, himself the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, became a rallying cry for those attacking thelaw and demanding a new immigration policy. As was common at the time, Handlin’s language hadan unspoken gender dimension, using “man” to encompass both men and women.

Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 has an act of Congress come so close to subverting theunderlying assumption on which the conception of citizenship in the United States rests: theassumption that there are no degrees of citizenship, that all Americans are completely equal in rightswhatever their place of birth. . . . Retaining the rigid national quotas, it [also] curtails severely thecivil liberties of immigrants and resident aliens. . . .

The [immigration] laws are bad because they rest on the racist assumption that mankind is dividedinto fixed breeds, biologically and culturally separated from each other, and because, within thatframework, they assume that Americans are Anglo-Saxons by origin and ought to remain so. To allother peoples, the laws say that the United States ranks them in terms of their racial proximity to ourown “superior” stock; and upon the many, many millions of Americans not descended from theAnglo-Saxons, the laws cast a distinct imputation of inferiority.

More recent defenders of the quota system, unwilling to endorse the open racism that gave it birth,have urged that the differentiations it establishes be regarded as cultural rather than racial. The SouthItalian or the Syrian, it is argued, is culturally less capable of adjusting to American life than theEnglishman or the German. . . . There is no evidence to support that contention. . . . Allowed to settlein peace, every variety of man has been able to make a place for himself in American life, to his ownprofit and to the enrichment of the society that has accepted him. The dreaded “riff-raff” of 1910—Greeks, Armenians, Magyars, Slovaks, Polish Jews—are the respected parents of respected citizenstoday. . . .

The Americans of the 19th century had confidence enough in their own society and in their owninstitutions to believe any man could become an American. More than ever do we now need toreaffirm that faith.

QUESTIONS

1. Why does Handlin believe that basic premises of the immigration quota system have beendisproven?

2. How does he invoke history to bolster his arguments?

An immigration official questions a farm worker in the fields near San Ysidro, California, in1954.

Also in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched a series of hearingsabout communist influence in Hollywood. Calling well-known screenwriters, directors, and actors toappear before the committee ensured a wave of national publicity, which its members relished.Celebrities like producer Walt Disney and actors Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan testified that themovie industry harbored numerous communists. But ten “unfriendly witnesses” refused to answerthe committee’s questions about their political beliefs or to “name names” (identify individualcommunists) on the grounds that the hearings violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedomof speech and political association. The committee charged the Hollywood Ten, who included theprominent screenwriters Ring Lardner Jr. and Dalton Trumbo, with contempt of Congress, and theyserved jail terms of six months to a year. Hollywood studios blacklisted them (denied thememployment), along with more than 200 others who were accused of communist sympathies or who

refused to name names.

The Spy TrialsA series of highly publicized legal cases followed, which fueled the growing anticommunist hysteria.Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine, testified before HUAC that during the 1930s,Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official, had given him secret government documents topass to agents of the Soviet Union. Hiss vehemently denied the charge, but a jury convicted him ofperjury and he served five years in prison. A young congressman from California and a member ofHUAC, Richard Nixon, achieved national prominence because of his dogged pursuit of Hiss. Inanother celebrated case, the Truman administration put the leaders of the Communist Party on trialfor advocating the overthrow of the government. In 1951, eleven of them were sentenced to fiveyears in prison.

The most sensational trial involved Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a working-class Jewish communistcouple from New York City (quite different from Hiss, a member of the eastern Protestant“establishment”). In 1951, a jury convicted the Rosenbergs of conspiracy to pass secrets concerningthe atomic bomb to Soviet agents during World War Ⅱ (when the Soviets were American allies).Their chief accuser was David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, who had worked at the LosAlamos nuclear research center.

The case against Julius Rosenberg rested on highly secret documents that could not be revealed incourt. (When they were released many years later, the scientific information they contained seemedtoo crude to justify the government’s charge that Julius had passed along the “secret of the atomicbomb,” although he may have helped the Soviets speed up their atomic program.) The governmenthad almost no evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, and Greenglass later admitted that he had lied insome of his testimony about her. Indeed, prosecutors seem to have indicted her in the hope ofpressuring Julius to confess and implicate others. But in the atmosphere of hysteria, their convictionwas certain. Even though they had been convicted of conspiracy, a far weaker charge than spying ortreason, Judge Irving Kaufman called their crime “worse than murder.” They had helped, hedeclared, to “cause” the Korean War. Despite an international outcry, the death sentence was carriedout in 1953. Controversy still surrounds the degree of guilt of both Hiss and the Rosenbergs,although almost no one today defends the Rosenbergs’ execution. But these trials powerfullyreinforced the idea that an army of Soviet spies was at work in the United States.

McCarthy and McCarthyismIn this atmosphere, a little-known senator from Wisconsin suddenly emerged as the chief nationalpursuer of subversives and gave a new name to the anticommunist crusade. Joseph R. McCarthy hadwon election to the Senate in 1946, partly on the basis of a fictional war record (he falsely claimed tohave flown combat missions in the Pacific). In a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, in February1950, McCarthy announced that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department.The charge was preposterous, the numbers constantly changed, and McCarthy never identified asingle person guilty of genuine disloyalty. But with a genius for self-promotion, McCarthy used theSenate subcommittee he chaired to hold hearings and level wild charges against numerousindividuals as well as the Defense Department, the Voice of America, and other governmentagencies. Although many Republicans initially supported his rampage as a weapon against theTruman administration, McCarthy became an embarrassment to the party after the election ofRepublican Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in 1952. But McCarthy did not halt his campaign. Heeven questioned Eisenhower’s anticommunism.

Few political figures had the courage to speak up against McCarthy’s crusade. One who did wasMargaret Chase Smith of Maine, the Senate’s only woman member. On June 1, 1950, soon afterMcCarthy’s Wheeling speech, Smith addressed the Senate with what she called a “declaration ofconscience.” She did not name McCarthy, but few could mistake the target of her condemnation of a“campaign of hate and character assassination.” Most of her colleagues, however, remained silent.

McCarthy’s downfall came in 1954, when a Senate committee investigated his charges that the armyhad harbored and “coddled” communists. The nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearingsrevealed McCarthy as a bully who browbeat witnesses and made sweeping accusations with no basisin fact. The dramatic high point came when McCarthy attacked the loyalty of a young attorney in thefirm of Joseph Welch, the army’s chief lawyer. “Let us not assassinate this lad further,” Welchpleaded. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?” After the hearings ended, theRepublican-controlled Senate voted to “condemn” McCarthy for his behavior. He died three yearslater. But the word “McCarthyism” had entered the political vocabulary, a shorthand for characterassassination, guilt by association, and abuse of power in the name of anticommunism.

An Atmosphere of FearBy the early 1950s, the anticommunist crusade had created a pervasive atmosphere of fear. Onecommentator described Washington, D.C., as a city rife with “spying, suspicion, [and] defamation byrumor,” with “democratic freedoms” at risk as power slipped into the hands of those “whose valuesare the values of dictatorship and whose methods are the methods of the police state.” Butanticommunism was as much a local as a national phenomenon. States created their own committees,modeled on HUAC, that investigated suspected communists and other dissenters. States andlocalities required loyalty oaths of teachers, pharmacists, and members of other professions, and theybanned communists from fishing, holding a driver’s license, and, in Indiana, working as aprofessional wrestler.

Private organizations like the American Legion, National Association of Manufacturers, andDaughters of the American Revolution also persecuted individuals for their beliefs. The BetterAmerica League of southern California gathered the names of nearly 2 million alleged subversives inthe region. Previous membership in organizations with communist influence or even participation incampaigns in which communists had taken part, such as the defense of the government of Spainduring the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, suddenly took on sinister implications. Throughout thecountry in the late 1940s and 1950s, those who failed to testify about their past and present politicalbeliefs and to inform on possible communists frequently lost their jobs.

“Fire!” Cartoonist Herbert Block, known as “Herblock,” offered this comment in 1949 on thedanger to American freedom posed by the anticommunist crusade.

Local anticommunist groups forced public libraries to remove from their shelves “un-American”books like the tales of Robin Hood, who took from the rich to give to the poor. Universities refusedto allow left-wing speakers to appear on campus and fired teachers who refused to sign loyalty oathsor to testify against others.

As during World War Ⅰ, the courts did nothing to halt the political repression, demonstrating onceagain James Madison’s warning that popular hysteria could override “parchment barriers” like theBill of Rights that sought to prevent infringements on freedom. In 1951, in Dennis v. United States,the Supreme Court upheld the jailing of Communist Party leaders even though the charges concernedtheir beliefs, not any actions they had taken.

The Uses of AnticommunismThere undoubtedly were Soviet spies in the United States. Yet the tiny Communist Party hardlyposed a threat to American security. And the vast majority of those jailed or deprived of theirlivelihoods during the McCarthy era were guilty of nothing more than holding unpopular beliefs andengaging in lawful political activities.

Anticommunism had many faces and purposes. A popular mass movement, it grew especially strongamong ethnic groups like Polish-Americans, with roots in eastern European countries now dominatedby the Soviet Union, and among American Catholics in general, who resented and fearedcommunists’ hostility to religion. Government agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) used anticommunism to expand their power. Under director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBIdeveloped files on thousands of American citizens, including political dissenters, gay men andlesbians, and others, most of whom had no connection to communism.

VOICES OF FREEDOM

From JOSEPH R. MCCARTHY, SPEECH AT WHEELING (1950)

During the 1950s, the demagogic pursuit of supposed communists in government and other places ofinfluence became known as McCarthyism, after Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican ofWisconsin. In a speech in West Virginia in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of 205communists working for the State Department. When he entered the speech into the CongressionalRecord a few days later, he reduced the number to fifty-seven. He never named any of them.

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. Themodern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, thechips are down—they are truly down.

Six years ago, at the time of the first conference to map out peace . . . there was within the Sovietorbit 180 million people. Lined up on the antitotalitarian side there were in the world at that timeroughly 1.625 billion people. Today, only six years later, there are 800 million people under theabsolute domination of Soviet Russia—an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure hasshrunk to around 500 million. . . .

The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful,potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions ofthose who have been treated so well by this nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members ofminority groups who have been selling this nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefitsthat the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education,and the finest jobs in government we can give.

This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silverspoons in their mouths are the ones who have been worst. . . . In my opinion the State Department,which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested withcommunists.

I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members orcertainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreignpolicy. . . . One thing to remember in discussing the communists in our government is that we are notdealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of new weapons. We are dealingwith a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.

From MARGARET CHASE SMITH, SPEECH IN THE SENATE(1950)

Most of McCarthy’s colleagues were cowed by his tactics. One who was not was Margaret ChaseSmith of Maine, the Senate’s only female member. On June 1, she delivered a brief speech, alongwith a Declaration of Conscience, signed by six other Republican senators.

The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body in the

world. But recently that deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum ofhate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity. . . .

I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul searching—for us to weigh our consciences—on the manner in which we are performing our duty to the peopleof America—on the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges.. . . I think that it is high time that we remembered; that the Constitution, as amended, speaks notonly of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation.

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all toofrequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles ofAmericanism—

The right to criticize; The right to hold unpopular beliefs; The right to protest; The right ofindependent thought.

The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right toa livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because hehappens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us doesn’t? Otherwise none of uscould call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in.

The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politicallysmeared as “Communists” or “Fascists” by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used tobe in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. The American peopleare sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed.

The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride topolitical victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear. . . .

As a United States Senator, I am not proud of the way in which the Senate has been made a publicityplatform for irresponsible sensationalism. . . . I don’t like the way the Senate has been made arendezvous for vilification, for selfish political gain at the sacrifice of individual reputations andnational unity.

QUESTIONS

1. What kind of social resentments are evident in McCarthy’s speech?2. What does Smith believe is the essence of freedom of speech?3. What do these documents suggest about how the Cold War affected discussions of freedom in

the early 1950s?

Anticommunism also served as a weapon wielded by individuals and groups in battles unrelated todefending the United States against subversion. McCarthy and his Republican followers oftenseemed to target not so much Stalin as the legacy of Roosevelt and the New Deal. For manyDemocrats, aggressive anticommunism became a form of self-defense against Republican charges ofdisloyalty and a weapon in a struggle for the party’s future. For business, anticommunism becamepart of a campaign to identify government intervention in the economy with socialism. Whitesupremacists employed anticommunism against black civil rights, employers used it against unions,and upholders of sexual morality and traditional gender roles raised the cry of subversion against

feminists and gay persons both supposedly responsible for eroding the country’s fighting spirit.

Anticommunist PoliticsAt its height, from the late 1940s to around 1960, the anticommunist crusade powerfully structuredAmerican politics and culture. Especially after their unexpected defeat in 1948, Republicans inCongress used a drumbeat of charges of subversion to block Truman’s political program. The mostimportant actions of Congress were ones the president opposed. After launching the government’sloyalty program in 1947, Truman had become increasingly alarmed at the excesses of theanticommunist crusade. He vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which required“subversive” groups to register with the government, allowed the denial of passports to theirmembers, and authorized their deportation or detention on presidential order. But Congress quicklygave the measure the two-thirds majority necessary for it to become law.

Truman did secure passage of a 1950 law that added previously excluded self-employed anddomestic workers to Social Security. Otherwise, however, the idea of expanding the New Dealwelfare state faded. In its place, private welfare arrangements proliferated. The labor contracts ofunionized workers established health insurance plans, automatic cost of living wage increases, paidvacations, and pension plans that supplemented Social Security. Western European governmentsprovided these benefits to all citizens. In the United States, union members in major industriesenjoyed them, but not the nonunionized majority of the population, a situation that created increasinginequality among laboring Americans.

The Cold War and Organized LaborEvery political and social organization had to cooperate with the anticommunist crusade or facedestruction, a wrenching experience for movements like labor and civil rights, in which communistshad been some of the most militant organizers. After the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947,which withdrew bargaining rights and legal protection from unions whose leaders failed to swear thatthey were not communists, the CIO expelled numerous left-wing officials and eleven communist-ledunions, representing nearly 1 million workers. Organized labor emerged as a major supporter of theforeign policy of the Cold War. Internal battles over the role of communists and their allies led to thepurging of some of the most militant union leaders, often the ones most committed to advancingequal rights to women and racial minorities in the workplace.

Cold War Civil RightsThe civil rights movement also underwent a transformation. At first, mainstream black organizationslike the NAACP and Urban League protested the Truman administration’s loyalty program. Theywondered aloud why the program and congressional committees defined communism as “un-American,” but not racism. Anticommunist investigators often cited attendance at interracialgatherings as evidence of disloyalty. But while a few prominent black leaders, notably the singer andactor Paul Robeson and the veteran crusader for equality W. E. B. Du Bois, became outspoken criticsof the Cold War, most felt they had no choice but to go along. The NAACP purged communists fromlocal branches. When the government deprived Robeson of his passport and indicted Du Bois forfailing to register as an agent of the Soviet Union, few prominent Americans, white or black,protested. (The charge against Du Bois was so absurd that even at the height of McCarthyism, thejudge dismissed it.)

The Cold War caused a shift in thinking and tactics among civil rights groups. Organizations like theSouthern Conference for Human Welfare, in which communists and noncommunists had cooperatedin linking racial equality with labor organizing and economic reform, had been crucial to thestruggles of the 1930s and war years. Their demise left a gaping hole that the NAACP, with itsnarrowly legalistic strategy, could not fill. Black organizations embraced the language of the ColdWar and used it for their own purposes. They insisted that by damaging the American image abroad,racial inequality played into the Russians’ hands. Thus, they helped to cement Cold War ideology asthe foundation of the political culture, while complicating the idea of American freedom.

President Truman, as noted above, had called for greater attention to civil rights in part to improvethe American image abroad. All in all, however, the height of the Cold War was an unfavorable timeto raise questions about the imperfections of American society. In 1947, two months after theTruman Doctrine speech, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson delivered a major addressdefending the president’s pledge to aid “free peoples” seeking to preserve their “democraticinstitutions.” Acheson chose as his audience the Delta Council, an organization of Mississippiplanters, bankers, and merchants. He seemed unaware that to make the case for the Cold War, he hadventured into what one historian has called the “American Siberia,” a place of grinding povertywhose black population (70 percent of the total) enjoyed neither genuine freedom nor democracy.Most of the Delta’s citizens were denied the very liberties supposedly endangered by communism.

After 1948, little came of the Truman administration’s civil rights flurry. State and local lawsbanning discrimination in employment and housing remained largely unenforced. In 1952, theDemocrats showed how quickly the issue had faded by nominating for president Adlai Stevenson ofIllinois, a candidate with little interest in civil rights, with southern segregationist John Sparkman ashis running mate. The following year, Hortense Gabel, director of the eminently respectable NewYork State Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, reported that the shadow of fear hungover the civil rights movement. Given the persecution of dissent and the widespread sentiment thatequated any criticism of American society with disloyalty, “a great many people are shying awayfrom all activity in the civil liberties and civil rights fronts.”

Time would reveal that the waning of the civil rights impulse was only temporary. But it came at acrucial moment, the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the United States experienced the greatesteconomic boom in its history. The rise of an “affluent society” transformed American life, openingnew opportunities for tens of millions of white Americans in rapidly expanding suburbs. But it left

blacks trapped in the declining rural areas of the South and urban ghettos of the North. The contrastbetween new opportunities and widespread prosperity for whites and continued discrimination forblacks would soon inspire a civil rights revolution and, with it, yet another redefinition of Americanfreedom.

GlossaryMcCarran-Walter ActImmigration legislation passed in 1952 that allowed the government to deport immigrants whohad been identified as communists, regardless of whether or not they were citizens.McCarthyismPost–World War Ⅱ Red Scare focused on the fear of communists in U.S. governmentpositions; peaked during the Korean War; most closely associated with Joseph McCarthy, amajor instigator of the hysteria.Hollywood TenA group called before the House Un-American Activities Committee who refused to speakabout their political leanings or “name names”—that is, identify communists in Hollywood.Some were imprisoned as a result.Army-McCarthy hearingsTelevised U.S. Senate hearings in 1954 on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s charges of disloyalty inthe army; his tactics contributed to his censure by the Senate.

CHAPTER REVIEW

REVIEW QUESTIONS1. What major ideological conflicts, security interests, and events brought about the Cold War?2. President Truman referred to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan as “two halves of

the same walnut.” Explain the similarities and differences between these two aspects ofcontainment.

3. How did the tendency of both the United States and the Soviet Union to see all internationalevents through the lens of the Cold War lessen each country’s ability to understand what washappening in other countries around the world?

4. Why did the United States not support movements for colonial independence around theworld?

5. How did the government attempt to shape public opinion during the Cold War?6. Explain the differences between the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s application of the

UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.7. How did the anticommunist crusade affect organized labor in the postwar period?8. What accounts for the Republican resurgence in these years?9. What were the major components of Truman’s Fair Deal? Which ones were implemented and

which ones not?10. How did the Cold War affect civil liberties in the United States?11. How did the McCarran-Walter Act codify the relationship between communism and

citizenship? Why did the clampdown on communism fall disproportionately on those regardedas outside the American mainstream?

KEY TERMSCold War (p. 908)

containment (p. 908)

Long Telegram (p. 910)

iron curtain (p. 910)

Truman Doctrine (p. 910)

Marshall Plan (p. 912)

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (p. 914)

NSC-68 (p. 915)

Korean War (p. 917)

decolonization (p. 918)

totalitarianism (p. 920)

Fair Deal (p. 923)

Operation Dixie (p. 923)

Taft-Hartley Act (p. 924)

Dixiecrats (p. 927)

McCarran-Walter Act (p. 930)

McCarthyism (p. 930)

Hollywood Ten (p. 932)

Army-McCarthy hearings (p. 934)

Go to

To see what you know—and learn what you’ve missed—with personalized feedback along the way.

Visit the Give Me Liberty! Student Site for primary source documents and images, interactive maps,author videos featuring Eric Foner, and more.

GlossaryCold WarTerm for tensions, 1945–1989, between the Soviet Union and the United States, the two majorworld powers after World War Ⅱ.containmentGeneral U.S. strategy in the Cold War that called for containing Soviet expansion; originallydevised by U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan.Long TelegramA telegram by American diplomat George Kennan in 1946 outlining his views of the SovietUnion that eventually inspired the policy of containment.iron curtainTerm coined by Winston Churchill to describe the Cold War divide between western Europeand the Soviet Union’s eastern European satellites.Truman DoctrinePresident Harry S. Truman’s program announced in 1947 of aid to European countries—particularly Greece and Turkey—threatened by communism.Marshall PlanU.S. program for the reconstruction of post–World War Ⅱ Europe through massive aid toformer enemy nations as well as allies; proposed by General George C. Marshall in 1947.North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)Alliance founded in 1949 by ten western European nations, the United States, and Canada todeter Soviet expansion in Europe.NSC-68Top-secret policy paper approved by President Truman in 1950 that outlined a militaristicapproach to combating the spread of global communism.Korean WarConflict touched off in 1950 when Communist North Korea invaded South Korea; fighting,largely by U.S. forces, continued until 1953.decolonizationThe process by which African and Asian colonies of European empires became independent inthe years following World War Ⅱ.totalitarianismThe term that describes aggressive, ideologically driven states that seek to subdue all of civilsociety to their control, thus leaving no room for individual rights or alternative values.Fair DealDomestic reform proposals of the Truman administration; included civil rights legislation,national health insurance, and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, but only extensions of some NewDeal programs were enacted.Operation DixieCIO’s largely ineffective post–World War Ⅱ campaign to unionize southern workers.Taft-Hartley Act1947 law passed over President Harry Truman’s veto; the law contained a number ofprovisions to weaken labor unions, including the banning of closed shops.DixiecratsLower South delegates who walked out of the 1948 Democratic national convention in protestof the party’s support for civil rights legislation and later formed the States’ Rights Democratic

(Dixiecrat) Party, which nominated Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president.McCarran-Walter ActImmigration legislation passed in 1952 that allowed the government to deport immigrants whohad been identified as communists, regardless of whether or not they were citizens.McCarthyismPost–World War Ⅱ Red Scare focused on the fear of communists in U.S. governmentpositions; peaked during the Korean War; most closely associated with Joseph McCarthy, amajor instigator of the hysteria.Hollywood TenA group called before the House Un-American Activities Committee who refused to speakabout their political leanings or “name names”—that is, identify communists in Hollywood.Some were imprisoned as a result.Army-McCarthy hearingsTelevised U.S. Senate hearings in 1954 on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s charges of disloyalty inthe army; his tactics contributed to his censure by the Senate.

Calculate your order
Pages (275 words)
Standard price: $0.00
Client Reviews
4.9
Sitejabber
4.6
Trustpilot
4.8
Our Guarantees
100% Confidentiality
Information about customers is confidential and never disclosed to third parties.
Original Writing
We complete all papers from scratch. You can get a plagiarism report.
Timely Delivery
No missed deadlines – 97% of assignments are completed in time.
Money Back
If you're confident that a writer didn't follow your order details, ask for a refund.

Calculate the price of your order

You will get a personal manager and a discount.
We'll send you the first draft for approval by at
Total price:
$0.00
Power up Your Academic Success with the
Team of Professionals. We’ve Got Your Back.
Power up Your Study Success with Experts We’ve Got Your Back.
Open chat
1
Hello. Can we help you?