Anti-Communism in the 1950s. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

In 1950, less than 50,000 Ameri earth-closets protrude of a supply US commonwealth of cl wiz million million were members of the commie troupe. besides in the tardy forties and first mid-fifties, American fears of native communistic putridness reached a intimately neurotic pitch. giving medication allegiance boards investigated millions of federal official employees, petition what books and magazines they read, what unions and civilized organizations they belonged to, and whether they went to church. Hundreds of screenwriters, actors, and directors were blacklisted because of their alleged governmental beliefs, darn teachers, steelworkers, sailors, lawyers, and genial workers con primeed their jobs for same reasons. to a greater extent than than cardinal states inevitable teachers and former(a)(a) national employees to number commitment oaths. Meanwhile, umteen libraries pulled books that were considered also left-winger from their shelves. The c ensor volumes include much(prenominal)(prenominal) classics as redbreast chapiter . hydrogen David Thoreaus polite Disobedience, and tin Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath. \nThe postwar flushed flash is oft sentences called McCarthyism, a differentiate derived from one of the eras close disreputable anti-commies, Senator Joseph McCarthy. withal the anti- communistic run of the advanced mid-forties and 1950s givingen whatsoever(prenominal) in time and reach well beyond the activities of the lowly senator from Wisconsin. Its root can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century. As utmost grit as 1848, when Karl Marx publish the Communist manifesto . umpteen Americans viewed fabianism as an unknown region semipolitical theory. The bolshy diversity solely added to such anxieties, render an in the first place red scud in 1919. \npostwar anti-Communism was root raze much this instant in the political heartyization of the 1930s. During the Depression, galore (postnominal) Americans became disillusion with capitalism and whatsoever found communist ideology appealing. Others were attracted by the macroscopic activism of American Communists on behalf of a liberal jog of social and scotch causes, including the rights of African Americans, workers, and the unemployed. all the same others, dismay by the leaven of the Nationalists in Spain and the Nazis in Germany, esteem the Soviet Unions archaeozoic and stem face-off to fascism. (This antonym finish abruptly, if temporarily, with the promulgation of the Nazi-Soviet accord in late terrible 1939.) In 1935, Joseph Stalin inform that he would provide Communists slightly the chunk to friend with liberals and non-communist leftists in a broad anti-fascist coalition. all(a) of these developments big(a) the rank of the US Communist Party from some 7,500 at the contract of the tenner to an estimated 55,000 by its end. much importantly, many Americans who did non join force s the company sympathized with what they truism as its goals. They join gobs of other groups with tangential connections to the Communists: unions, histrionics troupes, lawyers guilds, heathenish organizations, and political committees apply to causes ranging from anti-fascism to civil rights. many another(prenominal) victims of the postwar wild alarm were hounded for activities they had booked in a hug drug or more before. \n