She attempts to take a balanced, historical view and place both the hysteria and the views of the movement in an appropriate historical context.
Then, no one knew that the Soviet Union would eventually be defeated, as we do today -- but nor did leftists realize the full extent of Stalin's purges, and what would transpire after the Yalta Conference of 1945 in Eastern Europe. There was some vague plausibility to the idea of communists as spies intent upon creating a new form of government in the United States, just as there was the possibility in the mind of some leftists that the American media, after praising Russia when the U.S.S.R.'s help was necessary to defeat Hitler, was exaggerating the evils of Stalin in the eyes of many communists. Schrecker attempts to put the reader into the mindset of both communists and anti-communists of the period.
Anti-communism was not simply a product of mass, cultural hysteria. It also provided a practical foundation for many politicians' emerging careers. For example, as early as the smaller 'Red Scare' of 1919-20, J. Edgar Hoover made his name and solidified his institutional base within the Department of Justice by rounding up suspected foreign communists. Later, these ideologues and Hoover loyalists within the F.B.I would allow Hoover to conduct illegal wiretaps, and commit other civil liberties violations, with the power of the F.B.I. Richard Nixon first came to national prominence during the Alger Hiss trials. And McCarthy himself was a relatively obscure senator, until he began to wave his famous lists in the air. President Truman, despite the fact he held the highest office in the land, may have oversold the communist threat, to gain the necessary funds from the Republican-dominated congress for his postwar agenda and to prove himself worthy of the legacy of F.D.R.
The fear of seeming to ignore the communist threat created a kind of conspiracy of silence amongst civil libertarians, such as they existed, in American government. "An important element of the power of the modern state is its ability to set the political agenda and to define the crucial issues of the moment, through its actions as well as its words. During the early years of the cold...
President Eisenhower and his diplomats also chose to stop talking about the defeat of communism and instead focus on peaceful measures aimed at ending the "Cold War." And as the years passed, any attack on liberal thought which echoed "McCarthyism" automatically implied a paranoid and dysfunctional view of reality and placed the attacker in jeopardy. Congressionally, most of the members, both conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat, considered the
conservative intellectual movement, but also the role of William Buckley and William Rusher in the blossoming of the youth conservative movement Talk about structure of paper, who not strictly chronologically placed (ie hayek before the rest) - in this order for thematic purposes, to enhance the genuiness of the paper (branches of the movement brought up in order of importance to youth conservative revolt) For instance, Hayek had perhaps the
Orwellian World The Accuracy of George Orwell's Predictions and What They Hold for Our Future When, in 1949, George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world had just witnessed one of the most trying and tumultuous periods in all of human history. In the space of only thirty-five years, there had been two world wars, a communist revolution, a host of fascist dictators, and a frenzy of slaughter such as had never
First, American ideas about freedom have evolved over time, and this might be the natural model for freedom. To believe that an emerging democracy would immediately look like modern day America ignores the fact that freedom continues to evolve in America. Moreover, freedom is guaranteed by certain institutions, such as an independent judiciary, that generally develop over time. In Presidential address: American freedom in a global age, Eric Foner gives
nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century was a time of hardship for many Americans, and a time of extreme injustice for several groups, as well. African-Americans were strictly segregated and subjected to institutional racism by the state and local governments in the South and by cultural sentiments, and Native Americans continued to be pushed into ever-smaller reservations and subjected to a host of other injustices,
McCarthy and the Cold War One aspect of history is that a country's so-called "friend" one day, can be an enemy the next and visa versa. The United States and Soviet Union during World War II joined ranks against the real threat of Nazi Germany. However, it did not take long after the end of the war for Russia and the United States to once again bully each other. Even before
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