Communism During The Mid-1950s

As World War II came to a close in 1945, the Communist Party in America was beginning to simmer away. The government was worried that a Communist takeover in America would soon begin. They believed that these far-left ideas would destroy traditional American values.

Many of the policies implemented during Truman’s administration were provoking in the minds of the Soviets. And Americans would have probably been less fearful if President Truman hadn’t emphasized Communism as such a big threat. He installed fear in the minds of the citizens and other officials. Maybe not a fear of any tangible threat communism posed but the simple idea of being taken over, from abroad and

Post World War 1 there was a manifestation of Communist influence in the United States. The influence began forming itself in 1919. There was a division within the country between those who followed the beliefs of Communism and those who were against it. However the majority of Americans were against Communism and the spread of it. In J.Edgar Hoover’s testimony before the HUAC,

Fears of communism was a huge issue dating back after the Second World War. Americans were afraid of every new person coming into the United States and they did not want anyone who they thought was a “communist” to stay in the United States. The United States government made many Americans inclined to fear. Eisenhower's administration did not influence communism but Eisenhower's “Domino Theory” helped decrease a little of the American fears of communism. Containment also helped lower the fears that almost every American was having after the Second World War. Every policy that Eisenhower had was driven from the fear of communism. Communism was absolutely the biggest fear that Americans had dating back after the Second World War, the Eisenhower

While McCarthy may have been an adept manipulator of America’s fear of communism, by the time he made his allegations, these fears were already firmly entrenched in the American consciousness. Dating back as far the first Red Scare, during which a number of labor strikes were falsely attributed to communist agitation, Americans had been lead to believe that communism not only posed a threat to their way of life, but that communist agents were actively at work within not only America, but the American government. These fears were further exacerbated by the onset of the cold war following World War II, and by Truman’s announcement in 1949 that Russia had developed nuclear capabilities roughly 10 years ahead of schedule, which had lead to allegations of soviet espionage. Additionally, the case of Alger Hiss, which had been tried concurrently with McCarthy’s allegations, had presented the possibility that there were in fact a large number of high-level American government officials who were transmitting classified documents to Russia (the fact that Hiss had was a former member of the State Department of course helped McCarthy’s cause), despite the fact that this was probably not the

Throughout the 1950s, society was going through a period of post was confusion. After the end of World War, I, the first major Anti-Communist movement began in the United States, this was widely known as The Red Scare. The Red Scare was the growing fear of Communism in America. Being a Communist became illegal in the U.S. due to the fact that the Communist party was a radical movement that promoted rebellion and violence. The fear created by the development of the Soviet Union after World War I, and the rise to power of the Soviet Union after World War II caused widespread fear among many. Americans were encouraged to keep an eye on their friends and neighbors to ensure that they were not Communists or Soviet spies passing secrets to the Communists.

Communism was everything was the property of the government and people earned pay based on their abilities and needs. The United States did not agree with this kind of idea they felt that the citizens of the United States should be given a lot more freedom and to be able to own items. The United States had been in the Cold War, which was the war between socialism and communism, for some bit of time. The United States believed they were losing the cold war and needed to contain communism. This lead to a decision being made if the U.S. should join the Vietnam War. Many people, such as president John F. Kennedy spoke about their views on communism. John F. Kennedy explained how, “Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both”(1). The United States despises communism and felt that it needed to take action against the problem. The domino theory was just as equally important in what scared the United

McCarthyism rose to power so quickly in the late 1940’s and the early 1950’s because “the perception of an internal Communist threat had just enough plausibility to be convincing” . Americans feared that communists who would “overthrow the government” were a realistic threat . During World War Two there were many Soviet spies that had infiltrated many aspects of American covert operations. Alger

The fear of a Communist threat found its roots in the years after World War II. The idea that Soviet spies were stealing American secrets was later propagated by the Rosenberg trial. While Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy, his wife Ethel was only charged as a pawn to coerce her husband. Her execution was one of many examples of the suffering of people who were arraigned for even the slightest affiliation with the Communist party. The fear of Communism would lead to legal action in the name of national security. It is, of course, fallacious to link every person with Communist views to the Soviet Union. However, the anti-Communist movement was often riddled with fallacies, as can be seen in J. Edgar Hoover’s testimony before the HUAC in 1947.

Communism played a major role shaping the 20th century, both for the East and the United States. Its impact can be seen in the US from 1919 to the 1990s and even today. The spread of Communist ideals in the East meant the beginning of the socialist state and mass industrialization. Its effect on the US was much different. The United States people, heavily diversified of all races, religions, and financial statuses, became extremely jingoistic as a result of competition with the USSR. This nationalism became unhealthy as citizens began determining what was “un-American.” The Communist Party USA was not successful in their primary objective of spreading communism to the US. What they did achieve however was hugely important. They showed that citizens of the United States could be scared out of their own freedom. That fear would lead them to give up “liberty and justice for all”. Still a highly misunderstood idea, it is important for citizens of the United States to understand what communism is and what impact the CPUSA and other communist organizations had on the country.

According to Hutchinson Encyclopedia (2011), Then, in 1950 McCarthy started realizing what would promise re-election. Many people had already been fearful of the Soviet Union and the domino effect communism would have on other countries and how it might take over even here in the United states. Then, the American people heard of the Communist Regime going on in China. A huge country had fallen to communism; many felt others would fall right behind and join communism.You can conclude that Hutchinson Encyclopedia (2011) showed that Senator Joseph McCarthy played on the fears of Americans for his own personal gain. President Truman then authorized a policy of containment, or to let the countries who have already turned communist be communist, but not letting it spread to any other countries even if military actions was necessary. Military action was necessary. History.com(2009) stated, On June 25, 1950 the Korean war officially started. The war lasted three years, roughly 33,600 “battle deaths” in just three years! The war ended exactly where it started on July 27, 1953 the American and South Korean forces had stalemated with the Chinese and North Korean

It was the growing mistrust of this relatively new communist nation that led to the eventual fear of a global conflict between the two ideologies. This fear that was beginning to grip the American public was not only due the increasing military threat of the Soviet Union but also for fear of another internal economic crisis. The majority of the American population during this period directly experienced the great depression of the nineteen thirties the prosperity that proceeded it. Now America was in a state of postwar prosperity again and the standard of living had dramatically increased for the majority of the American public over the past twenty years. This rising middle class now saw their improved economic independence being threatened not only from a domestic economic disaster but also from a new outside force, Communism. Communism to the American people was a threat to the American dream, the American way of life, and most important to the basic freedoms and values that this country was

The House of Representatives had a program called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which investigated alleged communists in the United States. They mostly investigated Government officials and people in Hollywood. This committee added to the people communism hysteria and made them question how much they can question the government. One investigation became very popular because the investigated, Alger Hiss was well known in the government and was arrested for perjury. This freaked Americans out because he was well known in the government, which meant that anyone in the government could be a communist. Also, Truman's Loyalty Program investigated the loyalty of the people working in the federal government. Later on state, and local government, universities, churches, political organizations and businesses started to follow along with the policy, but made the employees take an oath pledging their loyalty to the US. Both of these organizations were very successful in suppressing the communist hysteria in the United States because it restored the people's faith in the government.The rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy was not as successful. McCarthy had made allegations of that he had a list of 205 people that were working in the government and military people were communists. McCarthy was saying that people were communists even though he had no evidence proving so. In 1954 the Army-McCarthy hearings were televised and Americans saw him for who he really was and began to turn against him. Truman not trying to stop McCarthy from making those allegations was bad because he was still disliked by the people from what had happened in the Korean War and China and did not want to get involved with another problem. For these reasons, you could say that President Truman could partially deserve the comment that he was “soft on communism” in the United

The conflicting decades of 1930s and 1940s were the settling and expository ground for the emergence of communism. This political philosophical movement that once had a reluctant growth was now boosted by the strong support by the united workers’ revolutions, especially in Russia, and by the World War II, a period of experiments in the political and social sphere. Although surrounded by controversies and opposition, communism was an important catalyst against the emergence of fascism’s dictatorship and the racism towards exploited black workers, in which the political ideology was able to contribute to the social-political world under communist leadership, despite of the public unfamiliarity which was a method to suppress the influence of future

In the United States, people tend to believe that communism is always dystopian, and fear it. Although communism can be dystopian, it is not always, because the main ideology of communism is that every person is equal. The word “communism” is “derived from the Latin communis, meaning ‘shared’ or ‘common’” (Dagger, Ball). The meaning of the word itself shows that the idea of communism is not always malicious. The ideology of communism was originally created by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in 1848. The reason the book was written was because the authors believed that the working class should control the government. They believed that in a truly communist society, there would be no “class divisions” (Dagger, Ball). Since communism involves