McCarthy's Communist Witch-Hunt

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of victory from World War II by treasonous subversives in the U.S. State Department. He especially blamed the 1949 Chinese communist takeover on treachery within the U.S. State Department. In that speech, McCarthy stated fifty-seven Communists were working in the State Department (Matusow 48).
Even when Senator McCarthy was giving his very first accusing speech in Wheeling he had not any factual information whatever to support his accusations. The truth is that in making his speech in Wheeling, Senator McCarthy was talking of a subject and circumstances about which he knew nothing. After the specially-appointed Tydings Committee reviewed McCarthy's work, they concluded that in no instance was any one of State Department employees found to be a card-carrying Communist, a member of the Communist Party, or loyal to the Communist Party (Matusow 67).
McCarthy's extreme and irresponsible statements called for emergency measures. As Senator Wherry told Emmanuel S. Larsen in January ...

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merely to establish guilt by association but guilt by accusation alone. This was something one would expect in a totalitarian nation where the rights of the individual are crushed beneath the juggernaut of oppression: it had no place in America where government exists to serve our people, not to destroy them (Kort 82).
In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), created by the House of Representatives to hunt out Communists, began conducting closed-door hearings to investigate allegations of communism in the movie industry. One of HUAC's complaints was that Hollywood had produced pro-Russian films such as Mission to Moscow, North Star, and Song of Russia. HUAC ignored ...

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