‘The Commies Are Coming’! – The American Inquisition

It’s been said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Personally, I believe the applies to us now more than ever. Specifically let’s talk about a historical event that doesn’t get enough attention, the ‘red scare’ of the 1950’s. Back in 1950, we like to imagine that it was the age of white picket fences and polite manners. Well, the historical record says something else a little different. Today we demonize various political parties (like I don’t know, say, the MAGA crowd) and we think that this unjustified vitriol is somehow novel to our era.

Let’s turn the clock back to February 9, 1950, at the Women’s Republican Club where Senator McCarthy said, ‘I have here in my hand, a list of card-carrying communists in the US government”! What followed was a wild goose chase that makes the Salem Witch Trials look sane.

The nation responded with overwhelming paranoia. All of the sudden a deep fear of the ‘commies’ swept across the nation. Joe McCathy was named head of a two year long investigation into the influence of ‘communists’ into the government, during which thousands of government employees were interrogated and lost their livelihoods. The American public became infected with a plague-like terror of the ‘commies’. No had any idea what communism actually was, but it didn’t matter. There were movies like “I Married a Communist”! Books like “I Was A Communist for the FBI”. There was even a poster of Captain America circulated where the Cap said, ‘Beware spies, traitors and commies! Captain America with all loyal and free men is looking for you!’

Not only did government workers lose their livelihoods, but hundreds thousands of American workers, ranging from blue collar workers to actors also lost their livelihoods because they were suspected of being ‘communists’. Often the suspicious were utterly baseless, but it didn’t matter. People were so terrorized that the mere mention of the word ‘communist’ was enough to send them into a frenzy. Well known individuals like Charlie Chaplin, W.E.B Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, and many others were labelled as ‘communists’ for reasons that didn’t even make sense. Again, in the Salem Witch Trials only about twenty people were implicated. The red scare impacted thousands.