The Red Scare

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the way Cold War anxiety produced the federal loyalty review program of 1947 and the broader domestic security apparatus that grew up alongside it.
• Explain the role of the House Un-American Activities Committee in producing the Hollywood blacklist and prosecuting the Alger Hiss case, including the parts played by Whittaker Chambers and Representative Richard Nixon.
• Trace the rise and fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy from his February 1950 Wheeling speech through the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 to his Senate censure in December of that year.
• Describe how the Smith Act of 1940 was used against the Communist Party of the United States and how the Supreme Court's 1951 decision in Dennis v. United States limited First Amendment protection for advocacy of revolution.
• Explain the parallel Lavender Scare and account for the civil-liberties response from Adlai Stevenson, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Cold War liberal coalition organized in Americans for Democratic Action.
• Account for the long shadow that postwar anti-communism cast on dissent, civil rights organizing, and federal employment well past the formal end of the Red Scare.

The Second Red Scare was the postwar United States turning its Cold War alarm inward. The wartime alliance with Joseph Stalin had produced victory in 1945; by 1947 the Soviet consolidation of Eastern Europe, the Berlin crisis, and the loss of an American nuclear monopoly to Soviet espionage had produced a domestic conviction that communism was not only a foreign threat but a hidden one. President Truman responded in March 1947, three weeks after the Truman Doctrine speech, by signing Executive Order 9835, which established the federal loyalty review program for the more than two million civilian employees of the federal government. The order created loyalty boards in every department, allowed dismissal on a finding of "reasonable doubt" about loyalty, and let the Attorney General publish a list of organizations whose past or present membership counted as evidence against an employee. Roughly twenty-six thousand employees were investigated under the program; about three hundred were dismissed and several thousand resigned under pressure. The order was the legal foundation of the Second Red Scare, and it framed everything that followed (KC-8.1.II.A).

Congress had its own instrument. The House Un-American Activities Committee, made a permanent standing committee in 1945, ran the most visible federal investigations of the postwar decade. Its October 1947 hearings on communist influence in Hollywood produced the contempt-of-Congress citations that became known as the Hollywood Ten: ten screenwriters and directors who refused on First Amendment grounds to answer the committee's questions, were sentenced to prison terms of up to one year, and were blacklisted from studio work after the studios announced the Waldorf Statement of December 1947. The blacklist, never written down as a single document, kept hundreds of writers, actors, directors, and musicians out of paid Hollywood work for the next decade; some, like Dalton Trumbo, wrote under pseudonyms or moved abroad. The committee's August 1948 hearings on State Department official Alger Hiss, with testimony from former Communist courier Whittaker Chambers and the prosecutorial work of California Representative Richard Nixon, produced the Hiss perjury conviction of January 1950 and made Nixon a national figure two years before he became Eisenhower's running mate.

Three months after the Hiss conviction, on February 9, 1950, a previously obscure Wisconsin senator stood at a Republican Lincoln Day dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia, and held up what he claimed was a list of two hundred and five communists employed inside the State Department. The number changed; the list was never produced. The speech launched McCarthyism, the four-year campaign of accusations that gave the Red Scare its name. Senator Joseph McCarthy chaired the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations after the Republican victory of 1952 and used it to investigate the State Department, the Voice of America, the Government Printing Office, the Army Signal Corps, and dozens of other federal agencies. His hearings named hundreds of people on television and produced almost no convictions; the Tydings Committee of 1950 and the Senate's own internal review found his charges unsubstantiated. The political damage, however, was significant. Federal employees were fired or pushed out, careers were ended, and the rhetorical model McCarthy provided shaped congressional investigation through the rest of the decade.

McCarthy fell faster than he rose. In April 1954 the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations opened the Army-McCarthy hearings, broadcast live by ABC and DuMont over thirty-six days, into McCarthy's accusation that the Army had harbored communists at its Fort Monmouth Signal Corps laboratory and into the Army's counter-charge that McCarthy had pressured it to grant favorable treatment to a former subcommittee aide. Twenty million Americans watched. Edward R. Murrow's CBS broadcast See It Now ran a thirty-minute exposé on McCarthy on March 9, 1954, that used the senator's own footage to make a case against him. The Army's counsel, Joseph Welch, asked McCarthy on June 9, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" The Senate voted on December 2, 1954, to censure McCarthy by a vote of sixty-seven to twenty-two. He died, alcoholic and politically broken, in 1957.

The Red Scare also produced criminal prosecutions. The Smith Act of 1940 made it a federal crime to advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force. In 1948 the Department of Justice indicted twelve members of the National Board of the Communist Party of the United States; eleven were convicted at the 1949 Foley Square trial in New York. The Supreme Court upheld the convictions six to two in Dennis v. United States (1951), holding that the gravity of the threatened harm, discounted by its improbability, justified the restriction on speech. Dennis opened the door to a second wave of Smith Act prosecutions through the early 1950s. The Court walked the doctrine back in Yates v. United States (1957) by distinguishing advocacy of abstract doctrine from advocacy of concrete action, but the chilling effect on left-wing organizing was already set. At the same moment, the federal trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of passing atomic-bomb design information to Soviet intelligence ended in conviction in March 1951 and execution in the electric chair at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953. The Rosenberg case has stayed contested ever since: Soviet records released after 1991 confirmed Julius Rosenberg's role as a recruiter and courier and indicated that Ethel Rosenberg's involvement was more limited than the prosecution argued at trial.

A parallel federal campaign, the Lavender Scare, dismissed gay and lesbian employees from the civil service and the military on the theory that their personal lives made them targets for Soviet blackmail. President Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450 of April 1953 added "sexual perversion" to the grounds for security disqualification, and an estimated five thousand to ten thousand federal employees were fired or forced to resign across the 1950s. The Lavender Scare ran longer and quieter than the Red Scare; the federal ban on gay employment was not formally lifted until 1995, and the State Department issued an apology only in 2017. Historians now treat the two scares as a single security regime with two faces.

Postwar anti-communism was not unopposed. Cold War liberalism, organized in the 1947 founding of Americans for Democratic Action by Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., insisted that the answer to communism was a more vigorous federal commitment to civil rights and economic security at home, not an expansion of the security state. Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson spoke openly against McCarthy in 1952 and 1956. The American Civil Liberties Union defended HUAC witnesses, challenged loyalty oaths in court, and built the legal record that the Warren Court would later draw on in Yates and Watkins. Civil rights organizers, especially in the NAACP, took the Red Scare seriously as a threat: the linking of Black activism to communist subversion was used against organizations like the Civil Rights Congress and against W. E. B. Du Bois, who was indicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1951 and acquitted in 1952. The cost to civil rights organizing through the 1950s was substantial, and one of the reasons the Black freedom movement that emerged after Brown v. Board of Education was led from the southern church rather than from a left-labor coalition.

The long shadow of the Red Scare reached well past 1957. HUAC continued to investigate civil rights and antiwar activists into the late 1960s and was renamed the House Internal Security Committee before being abolished in 1975. The federal loyalty review program survived in modified form into the 1980s. Hollywood graylists persisted into the 1960s. The political grammar McCarthy supplied—public accusation as a substitute for evidence, the demand that an opponent prove a negative, the conflation of dissent with disloyalty—has resurfaced in every later episode of American political conflict. The lesson of Period 8 is not that the Red Scare ended in 1954 but that the security state and the rhetorical habits it built outlasted the senator who briefly named it (KC-8.1.II.A; Theme NAT).

The five excerpts below mark the institutional, the rhetorical, the prosecutorial, the constitutional, and the critical bookends of the Second Red Scare.

1. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from Soviet detonation of an atomic device in August 1949 to the federal indictment of the Rosenbergs in 1950. At which step in the chain do you think a different decision could have produced a different outcome, and why?
2. (Sourcing and Situation) The Wheeling speech of February 1950 produced no list, no convictions, and no immediate firings. Account for why it nevertheless reshaped national politics for the next four years. What about the historical situation made McCarthy's claim land?
3. (Comparison) Compare the Hollywood blacklist with the federal loyalty review program. Both were responses to the same Cold War anxiety. How did the legal mechanism, the actors involved, and the lasting effects differ between the private-industry blacklist and the federal program?
4. (Causation) Account for the role of television in McCarthy's fall. Compare Edward R. Murrow's See It Now broadcast of March 9, 1954, with the Army-McCarthy hearings of April through June 1954. What does the comparison reveal about the relationship between the new mass medium and the limits of demagoguery?
5. (Continuity and Change) The Cold War liberalism organized in Americans for Democratic Action argued that anti-communism abroad required civil-liberties protection at home. Account for the tensions inside that position. How did Cold War liberals reconcile support for containment with opposition to the loyalty program and the Smith Act?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.