Joseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread communist subversion. He alleged that numerous communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry, and elsewhere. Ultimately, he was censured for refusing to cooperate with, and abusing members of, the committee established to investigate whether or not he should be censured. The term "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.
McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of alleged communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s. After the mid-1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had spearheaded the campaign, gradually lost his public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false. The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren made a series of rulings on civil and political rights that overturned several key laws and legislative directives, and helped bring an end to the Second Red Scare. Historians have suggested since the 1980s that as McCarthy's involvement was less central than that of others, a different and more accurate term should be used instead that more accurately conveys the breadth of the phenomenon, and that the term McCarthyism is, in the modern day, outdated. Ellen Schrecker has suggested that Hooverism, after FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover, is more appropriate.
A Red Scare is a form of moral panic provoked by fear of the rise, supposed or real, of leftist ideologies in a society, especially communism. Historically, "red scares" have led to mass political persecution, scapegoating, and the ousting of those in government positions who have had connections with left-wing to far-left ideology. The name is derived from the red flag, a common symbol of communism.
Roy Marcus Cohn was an American lawyer and prosecutor who came to prominence for his role as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954, when he assisted McCarthy's investigations of suspected communists. In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, he became a prominent political fixer in New York City.
Owen Lattimore was an American Orientalist and writer. He was an influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he never earned a college degree, in the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1938 to 1963. He was director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations from 1939 to 1953. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate on U.S. policy toward Asia. From 1963 to 1970, Lattimore was the first Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds in England.
A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century was the imaginary book title of a 1950s hoax purporting a foreign communist plot to increase racial tensions in the United States. The hoax gained public notoriety when a congressman read a supposed quotation from the book to argue against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The phony quotation was later traced to the antisemite Eustace Mullins.
Eugene Lyons, born Yevgeny Natanovich Privin, was a Russian-born American journalist and writer. A fellow traveler of Communism in his younger years, Lyons became highly critical of the Soviet Union after several years there as a correspondent of United Press International. Lyons also wrote a biography of President Herbert Hoover.
Benjamin Gitlow was a prominent American socialist politician of the early 20th century and a founding member of the Communist Party USA. At the end of the 1930s, Gitlow turned to conservatism and wrote two sensational exposés of American Communism, books which were very influential during the McCarthy period. Gitlow remained a leading anti-communist up to the time of his death.
Alfred Kohlberg was an American textile importer. A staunch anti-Communist, he was a member of the pro-Chiang "China lobby", as well as an ally of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, a friend and advisor of John Birch Society founder Robert W. Welch Jr., and a member of the original national council of the John Birch Society.
Plain Talk was an American monthly anticommunist magazine that was published for 44 months from 1946 to 1950. Its editor-in-chief was Isaac Don Levine.
George Ephraim Sokolsky was a weekly radio broadcaster for the National Association of Manufacturers and a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who later switched to The New York Sun and other Hearst newspapers. He was also an expert on China. Sokolsky was widely regarded as Joseph McCarthy's mentor. He even introduced McCarthy to Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, two key players in McCarthy's Red Scare.
Lawrence W. Fertig was an American advertising executive and a libertarian journalist and economic commentator.
Isaac Don Levine was a 20th-century Russian-born American journalist and anticommunist writer, who is known as a specialist on the Soviet Union.
Joseph Brown "Doc" Matthews Sr. (1894–1966), best known as J. B. Matthews, was an American linguist, educator, writer, and political activist. A committed pacifist, he became a self-described "fellow traveler" of the Communist Party USA in the mid-1930s, achieving national prominence as a leader of a number of the party's so-called "mass organizations". Disillusionment with communism led to anti-communist testimony before the Dies Committee in 1938. He then served as chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, headed by Martin Dies Jr., consultant on Communist affairs for the Hearst Corporation, and by June 1953 research director for Joseph McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the United States Senate. When Matthews published claims that the Protestant clergy comprised a base of support of the American Communist movement, he was forced to resign. This was regarded as McCarthy's first big defeat, signaling that his position was starting to weaken among his colleagues.
Joseph P. Kamp was an American political activist from New York who ran the Constitutional Educational League and was jailed in 1950 for contempt of Congress.
Benjamin Mandela.k.a. "Bert Miller" was a New York city school teacher and communist activist who later became an ex-communist director of research for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SIS).
Albert Franklyn Canwell (1907–2002) was an American journalist and politician who served as a member of the Washington State legislature from 1947 to 1949. He is best remembered as the namesake of the Washington legislature's Canwell Committee to investigate communist influence in Washington state, patterned after the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) of the United States Congress.
Donald Angus Cameron, publicly known by his middle name, was an American book editor and publisher. Cameron scored his first success handling The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer for Indianapolis publisher Bobbs-Merrill Company in 1936. He moved to Little, Brown and Company in 1938.
Counterattack was a weekly subscription-based, anti-communist, mimeographed newsletter that ran from 1947 to 1955. It was published by American Business Consultants, a "private, independent organization" started by three ex-Federal Bureau of Investigation agents.
The American China Policy Association (ACPA) was an anti-communist organization that supported the government of Republic of China, now commonly referred to as Taiwan, under Chiang Kai-shek.
