Mccarthyism And The Red Scare

The Red Scare and McCarthyism had begun Paranoia, disloyalty, people losing jobs. The Red Scare and McCarthyism both made everything else worse. Communism is a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. At the end of the month when they get their paychecks they both end up with the same amount of money it is not fair, right? but that is more or less what McCarthyism is. During the 1950s, there was a great amount of paranoia and the government technically speaking did not confide in anyone else and falsely accused other people (Essay). The government was so paranoid that they had

College students were aware that over 38,000 American troops had been killed in Vietnam and if something wasn’t done on the streets of America, many more would die. With tensions running high all over America’s college campues, the unrest of the anti-war movent was just about to get worse. Nixon’s decision to engage more troops into a sensless War, sparked a new wave of protests that errupted into many violent standoffs. Unknown to the country, this unrest would take a fatal and trajic turn.

The Red Scare, also known as, McCarthyism started in the early 1950’s. It got the name McCarthyism from Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy. McCarthy started The Red Scare. It was very similar to a witch hunt but, it wasn’t witches they were hunting for. They were searching for communist. The Red Scare was a horrible and cruel period during the early 1900’s.

McCarthyism has a lot to do with America 's history, even still today examples of McCarthyism are seen in america . Most victims of mccarthyism are hollywood actors and famous people because they impact american society more than regular people. Famous people such as Helen Keller, Leonard Bernstein , Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Artie Shaw, Zero Mostel, Charlie Chaplin, Langston Hughes, Orson Welles, and Dolores del Rio were blamed for supposedly being part of the communist party. But that was not all, there was also another 205 average people that were blamed for being a part of the communist party as well. McCarthy’s committee then started investigating the United States Army. His charges kept affecting more and more powerful people.

The shooting of Kent State University on May 4, 1970 marked a point in the war that divided the nation and brought attention to the war on a scale never seen before. Fighting on the battleground was brought to America’s soil through the power of television and as the battle continued, emotions on the homefront intensified. The executive decision of President Richard Nixon initiated the protests and swung the opinion of the use of military force in Vietnam by his “April 30 announcement that he had sent American forces into Cambodia” (Reichard). President Nixon’s decision of sending forces into Cambodia sparked the protests on many campuses, one of them being Kent State, leading to the shooting and killing of four students, however only two of the students shot and killed were involved in the protests. “The killing… was another important turning point for many GI and veteran activists” (Moser 108).

A terrible conflict left a mark on American History that had never been seen before. For the first time in the countries’s history people were not proud of their governments role in a war. Protest engulfed the Nation as people were disgusted with choices made by their leaders and the subsequent actions carried out by their soldiers. When the soldiers came back home they were not greeted with the praise that prior generations had gotten. They were given little attention and in some cases hated. This conflict of course was the Vietnam War.

The decades of both the 1960s and 1970s were tumultuous decades. Protests, violence, activist movements, war, and more marked these decades, and within this time period and lingering still after, the American people grew to distrust their government. While there were many factors that led people to distrust the government, a few very important factors to this distrust were the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal, and President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon. The Vietnam War was a devastating affair.

From the Tet Offensive to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and then the Civil Rights protests and riots. The year was definitely a year of catastrophe for American society. The Vietnam War started in 1961 in an attempt to stop the spread of communism. The biggest attack was in 1968 when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese suddenly launched their strongest offensive.

The Vietnam War, lasting almost twenty years and deploying 2.7 million troops to the front lines, was one of the largest wars in United States history. Beginning August 2nd, 1964, the war killed 58,000 American soldiers and disabled twice that number. The war brought humiliation to our great nation, and created very overwhelming tensions, in a quote by President Nixon, “Let us be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that” (Doc G). These tensions grew immensely over the course of the war. In terms of political tensions, the trust and credibility of the war and government began to seem very questionable. Socially, the public began to acknowledge

With the Vietnam War in full-swing, 1970 proved to be a year filled with protests and debates by people

He was amicable; loved by his friends and family. He was raised Roman Catholic, was a member of the National Rifle Association and a registered Republican. He led a typical American life. He grew up in a rural town just outside of Buffalo and he was neighborly, an all-American. His beliefs were never strange or confined to the fringes of American society. In fact, the fear of outsiders and the need to bear arms is something that recurs throughout American history, from the eras of the Ku Klux Klan to the period of McCarthyism. The largest difference between the man that drove that car into a federal building and the majority of Americans is that he was prepared to shed blood to defend “liberty.” His name was Timothy McVeigh and was

During the 1960s and 1970s, America endured the Vietnam War and protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. From college campus demonstrations, to newspaper articles and radio broadcasts, antiwar sentiment blossomed through different mediums to convey how dissatisfied some citizens felt against the War’s duration. May 4, 1970 saw college students of Kent State University holding a common antiwar demonstration turn unusually fatal: four students were shot dead and nine others sustained wounds. It was the third day in a larger protest at Kent State criticizing the then recent April 1970 move of American troops into Cambodia. No one was injured during the protest’s first two days, but when students starting vandalizing buildings and throwing rocks at the Ohio National Guardsmen on campus, the soldiers retaliated with gunfire. Having students killed over opposing the War, the incident added more material into the ongoing debate of whether citizens should protest U.S. involvement and evade conscription. Antiwar protestors had saw Vietnam as a country not worth fighting in to curb Communism. Others saw the War as necessary to fight Communism. In his book Fortunate Son, returning veteran Lewis B. Puller did not know how he should react when U.S. troops murdered protestors; mixed feelings of supporting antiwar demonstrations but not callously dismissing the War-inflicted deaths and injuries his fellow soldiers and him bore clouded his opinion. The New York Times, however, backed

Discomfort on the part of the society of America began to become more apparent and on October 15, 1965 one of the first demonstrations against the war occurred in New York City. More than 25,000 people attended the event of protest. World War II veterans against the war at Vietnam began getting harassed by supporters of the war and the negative image Vietnam would portray started coming into focus (2). The rallies of those against the war continued throughout the nation during the entire length of the war and from 1969 to 1973 “the original negative image of the Vietnam veteran was born” (3). A division amongst society quickly became apparent in those against the war and those for or fighting in the war at Vietnam. Avoiding the draft was practiced by numerous individuals who did not want to be succumbed to the negativity of America. American citizen, Adam Edwards said of the draft situation, “As I look back at it now, I would have postponed my schooling and gone with my initial feeling of joining the war. I was not in fear of what could happen in Vietnam but rather how much the community around me would have disapproved of my participating (4).

Taking a turning point a TV program disclosed McCarthy’s invalid oppression, he began to lose his confidence and supports from about the middle 1950’s. After he resigned as the senator of US congress, the philosophy of McCarthyism maintain today’s right-wing nationalists to condemn terrorists (Murray, 2005).

I am currently a student and radical protester at Virginia Polytechnic Institute or “VPI” in the spring of 1970. My purpose of writing to you is to present a student point of view on the current growing campus unrest at my university due to the anti-war movement and its opposition. I believe that the United States involvement in the Vietnam war is one huge costly mistake that could have easily been avoided. The war had nothing to do with the United States originally as Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, was not seeking help from other communist nations and America made what was going to be just a civil war into something much greater. As a result of this we students have the right to voice our disapproval and express our opinions in anyway we choose. The reason why I have chosen to be a radical protester is because that is the only way our voices are going to be heard by President Nixon. Whereas those who consider themselves as “moderate anti-war protesters” are not doing enough to be recognize; The war supporter are being brainwashed by the government into thinking it 's for the greater good of the nation and are blinded by what is actually happening overseas; The silent majority are apathetic to an issue that they should care about due to the size of the issue and its effect both on domestic and foreign fronts.