Cold War Essay Research Paper While the

Cold War Essay, Research Paper

While the United States was fighting the Cold War to preserve its freedoms, the fears and anti-Communism the Cold War helped cause at home undermined some of those freedoms. One of the most notorious examples of this is Senator Joseph McCarthy. In his search for Communists in the U.S. government he infringed upon civil rights and freedoms, such as freedom of speech, provided to all Americans by Constitution. His actions caused a lot of innocent people, mostly government employees, to loose their jobs and reputation. In addition, in the case of Hollywood Ten, the freedom of speech – the most vital freedom in democratic society, was violated because the speech and views of Hollywood Ten where different, or were thought to be different, from those of House Un-American Activities Committee. In another case, the Rosenbergs Trial, the basic rules of criminal procedure and burden of proof were buried under the anti-Communist hysteria and two possible innocent people were electrocuted.

McCarthy was little known before gaining national attention with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 12, 1950. In that address, McCarthy argued that the United States was denied the fruits 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 1951, “Oh, Mac [McCarthy] has gone out on a limb and kind of made a fool of himself and we have to back him up now.” Starting with nothing, Senator McCarthy and his supporters plunged headlong forward, desperately seeking to develop some information which, colored with distortion and fanned by a blaze of bias, would forestall a day of reckoning (Matusow 54).

As a result of McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts, the character of private citizens and of Government employees was virtually destroyed by public condemnation on the basis of deliberate untruths. For example, McCarthy was responsible for stripping Robert Openheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb, of his security clearance. Because Openheimer had publicly questioned the ethical implications of the atomic bomb for years, he was a suspect of subversion. McCarthy was unstoppable; politicians dared not criticize him for fear of being accused of Communism themselves (Matusow 85).

By the mere fact of their associations with a few persons of alleged questionable proclivities, an effort had been made to harm people whose only asset was their character and devotion to duty and country. This had been done without the slightest vestige of respect for even the most elementary rules of evidence or fair play or, indeed, common decency. Indeed, it was an effort not 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 the fact that the films had been made at the urging of the Office of War Information after the World War II, to make Americans sympathize with their new ally. The committee interviewed actors like Robert Taylor, Ronald Reagan, and Gary Cooper and studio owners such as Walt Disney. Some witnesses testified to alleged subversive activities and named names of alleged communists. But ten witnesses, known as Hollywood Ten, all screenwriters, refused to answer questions, including whether they had ever been members of the Communist Party (Feis 109).

The experiences of the Hollywood Ten were emblematic. Though their cases did not set legal precedents, these screenwriters and directors became the most notorious group of HUAC witnesses to rely on the First Amendment. They had all been in the Communist Party and, when subpoenaed to appear before the committee in October 1947, they took a confrontational stand. Like many of HUAC’s other unfriendly witnesses of the period, they and their attorneys assumed that the Supreme Court would probably vindicate them; also, they used their public hearings as a forum to expound their own political views. Witnesses and committee members y