Who Is Joseph Mccarthy A Victim Of The Second Red In The 1950s

The Second Red during the 1950s was a period of heightened political repression against communists as well as a campaign spreading fear of their influence on American institutions. It was this social setting where thousands of Americans were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before the United States government. The most visible public figure of this attack against communist subversion was Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. He was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. His name and legacy would forever be synonymous with the term

However, newly released archival materials such as the Venona intercepts show the extent of Communist subversion in pre- and post-war America. There were indeed hundreds of Communists working for Moscow, directly or indirectly, in the United States during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The problem that plagued Joe McCarthy was that by the time he surfaced with his accusations in the 1950’s, the key Soviet spy networks had all been closed down. For decades, many people believed that anyone who was accused of being a spy for the Soviets in the '50s was in fact just another innocent victim of the McCarthy’s witch hunt. Although it is true that McCarthy’s witch hunt did ruin the lives of innocent people, the fact is there were witches to be hunted and there had been a threat national security presented by communist spying and subversion in the 1940’s. McCarthy's critical failure was giving anti-Communism a bad name, because those people who actually did betray America and were communist spies have been portrayed for years as heroic victims

He was right that there was a real threat of national security posed by communist spying and subversion. Secondly he had been right that the American Communist Party was a political party serving as an agent for a foreign power. As Venona shows, the Communist American Party did indeed have knowledge of Communist networks within the government, and actively recruited spies. McCarthy was also, right that the administrations of Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt had been to slow to react to the Communist threat. Even though Soviet Spy networks in America were closed down by 1945 because of fear that Elizabeth Bentley’s defection would compromise there operations, American Intelligence had no knowledge of that (Ronash). So when McCarthy made his charges, even if the Soviet Spy Networks were closed, there were still 200 plus unidentified people who had served as Soviet Spies