HIS 359
Yaolee Chen
Robert McCoy

The Red Scare

The Second Red Scare or called the Post Second War Anti-Communism was based on the fear of the Communism and had caused the misfortune to many government employee. The HUCA and McCarthyism particularly caused innocent Americans lost jobs. In foreign policy, the spending on the military weapons had gone beyond the need of defense. Yet, the positive things that the Red Scare had done to the Americans are the social reform and the better scientific technology.

The Second Red Scare was similar to the First Red Scare both led the American politics to the right wing. In the First Red Scare, we tended to stop the racial riots; by which scare we saw the racial reform was but a legacy. In the Second Red Scare, we tended to stop the communists; and at the same time, we also found that the New Deal by Franklin Roosevelt (a deal that allowing labors to bargaining collectively) was also but a legacy. So the anti-communism reform caused the social conscious for the right of properties and that we marched toward the Democracy.

But the dark side of the anti-communism reform was the causing people to lost jobs. A loyalist Harry S. Truman caused HUCA and FBI to arrest any employee of the US government that was suspected to be the communists. The Department of Justice in 1948 indicated and convicted the party of communists. Several hundred Communists went to jail. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated supposed Communist subversion throughout American society. The Supreme Court, despite the serious constitutional issues involved, placed few restrictions on the anticommunist campaign. Official authorities like HUAC and the FBI usually handled the first stage by identifying the tainted individuals, and employers usually handled the second by firing them. Senate Joseph McCarthy listed 205 people in the blacklist; by which list, the professors, the actors of Hollywood and the writers of Hollywood lost jobs. The American liberalists were threatened by the crusade.

From another viewpoint, the anti-communists crusade could be a good thing. One-Hundred-and-Forty-Five percent of GNP up from 1945 to 1960; since the right of the properties was up-held, the Americans were more willingly to invest their money on housing and education. Increasing demands on electric-application. GI bill paid for the free education for men who served in the army. And government paid loan for the housing on the crab house frontiers in New Jersy. And most of all, the spending on the military defense, like the National Defense Educational Activity invested scientists to create chemical weapons, and eventually widening the gaps of American scientific technology with the rest of the world.

The Second Red Scare caused the innocents to lost jobs; yet, in general, the Red Scare brought the post war prosperity of the 1950s in the United States. And the cause of the prosperity was the fears of the communists which was an ideology that we were afraid the Russia to take away our capitalism. The results of the crusade could be positive and negative