In 1948, before the HUAC, professed-Communist Whittaker Chambers accused former high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss of espionage during the 1930s.
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Postwar HUAC investigators probed whether Communists and sympathizers to communism had played an active role in the labor movement, the movie industry, and the executive departments of the federal government.
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), established in 1938 to monitor disloyalty to the United States government, was made a permanent committee in 1945. Anticommunism dominated the political debates of the immediate post-World War II-era. It was against the backdrop of this "Cold War" that the threat of internal subversion and external attack began to preoccupy Congress.
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These suspicions and fears led to the creation of a series of temporary House and Senate committees to investigate subversive threats to the government.ĭuring World War II the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, but as soon as the war ended the two superpowers began to struggle against each other for supremacy. Some of the experimental programs of Roosevelt's New Deal fostered concerns that the federal government was falling under communist direction. Communist state economic planning, as well as certain Nazi and fascist economic measures, appealed to some desperate Americans. During the decade of the 1930s, governments adopted new and experimental techniques to combat the economic ravages of the Great Depression. In response to the "Red Scare" of 1919 a special Senate committee was convened. The charge-never substantiated-grabbed headlines at a time when friction with the Soviet Union and fear of communist subversion were growing in the country.įear of communism had existed since the 19th century but did not merit congressional investigation until after the Bolshevik Revolution and the close of World War I. Holding up a piece of paper, he claimed to have in his possession information proving that more than 200 employees in the State Department were card-carrying members of the Communist Party.
McCarthy was nearing the end of his first term as senator and needed a big issue to energize his run for a second term. On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy stepped into the spotlight of national attention with a speech given at Wheeling, West Virginia. Background information | Discussion Questions | Activities | Resources BACKGROUNDįrom National Archives and Records Administration
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