Red Scare

Red Scare, period of public fear and anxiety over the supposed rise of communist or socialist ideologies in a noncommunist state. The term is generally used to describe two such periods in the United States. The first occurred from 1917 to 1920, amid an increase in organized labour movements, immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. The second period, also called McCarthyism after U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, took place from roughly 1947 to 1954.

First Red Scare (1917–20)

The first Red Scare began toward the end of World War I. It was fueled in part by a surge in activity among organized labour alongside anxiety stemming from the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which Vladimir Lenin’s Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party overthrew the Russian tsar and proved that a popular labour-led movement could successfully take over the reins of government. Fears of a Bolshevik conspiracy to overthrow the United States government drove paranoia, and U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer carried out a series of raids against foreign-born individuals who were accused of anarchist, communist, and radical leftist sympathies. The Palmer Raids, which were sometimes brutal and of questionable constitutionality, drew increasing criticism from the public as they failed to produce evidence of a Bolshevik conspiracy. The credibility of the Red Scare diminished in 1920 as Palmer’s predictions of a revolution on May Day that year went unfulfilled.

Second Red Scare (1947–54)

The second Red Scare took place after World War II and at the nascence of the Cold War. The uneasy wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union had begun to unravel, and by 1948 the Soviets had installed communist governments in the countries of eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army. Many Americans were likewise alarmed by developments in 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, took power in China and the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb.

In 1950 U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy began asserting that communists had infiltrated the highest ranks of the government, claiming in a speech that he had a list of employees of the U.S. Department of State who were loyal to the Soviet Union. He called for investigations into staff in the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other government agencies. Upon his reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1952, he was appointed chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and Investigations. In this capacity he presented colourful accusations that drove some government workers out of their jobs and brought popular condemnation to others. Many people besides McCarthy promoted the scare, which led to few convictions but much loss of employment for government employees, teachers, scholars, and people in the mass media.

Most notably, throughout the 1940s and ’50s the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) conducted investigations into alleged communist activities by individuals who included well-known artists and entertainers. Among those investigated were film director Elia Kazan, playwrights Arthur Miller and Bertolt Brecht, folksinger Pete Seeger, and the so-called Hollywood Ten, 10 motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters whose refusal to answer the committee’s questions regarding their possible communist affiliations resulted in their incarceration for contempt of Congress as well as blacklisting by the Hollywood studios for most of them. HUAC’s most celebrated case, however, did not involve an entertainment industry figure but instead Alger Hiss, a former U.S. State Department official who was convicted in January 1950 of perjury concerning his involvement with Whittaker Chambers, who accused him of having participated in a communist spy ring.

The second Red Scare peaked in 1954 during the “McCarthy hearings,” 36 days of televised investigative hearings into alleged espionage within the U.S. Army. The hearings, led by McCarthy, exposed his sensational and truculent interrogation tactics. At the hearings’ climax, the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, countered one of McCarthy’s accusations by saying, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Welch’s response gave expression to the public discrediting of McCarthy, who in December was censured by his colleagues in the Senate.