Departments

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McCarthyism

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    4/27/2023

    Shameful Echoes of the 1950s Lavender Scare

    by David K. Johnson

    At the height of the McCarthy era, a bipartisan congressional committee concluded that gay and lesbian personnel should be purged from government service because of the alleged "weakness of their moral fiber." Teaching this history could make students more able to recognize political moral panics today. 

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    3/12/2023

    Whittaker Chambers's Odyssey from Communist Spy to Conservative Hero

    by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell

    Praised by the right and loathed by the left, Whittaker Chambers entered the public eye when he accused State Department worker Alger Hiss of being a Communist. But his story before and after reveals much more about the political history of midcentury America. 

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    1/13/2023

    When McCarthyism Hit Small-Town Vermont

    by Rick Winston

    The events that roiled one small town in 1950 showed the courage and integrity of newspaper editors who resisted a "red scare" but also the harm inflicted on a community by weaponized suspicion. 

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    10/6/2022

    H. Chandler Davis Was a Moral Touchstone for Scholars on the Left

    by Alan Wald

    Blacklisted from American academe after defying a HUAC investigation at the University of Michigan, the mathematician (and the spouse of historian Natalie Zemon Davis) continued to teach and work as an activist in Canada until his recent death at 96. 

  • SOURCE: Hollywood Reporter
    9/9/2022

    Blacklisted Actress Marsha Hunt Dies at 104

    Hunt's participation in the Committee for the First Amendment, which questioned the activities of the House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1947, led to her blacklisting. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    5/19/2021

    When a Right-Wing Attack on Textbooks Was Stopped

    by Jonathan Zimmerman

    A McCarthy-era attack on a leading civics textbook fell short because of both organized resistance and the unpopularity of the ideas behind the ban. Supporters of academic freedom today can potentially draw on both of those elements, too. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    3/30/2022

    Nationwide, Faculty Fight for Academic Freedom

    by Ellen Schrecker

    "When they act collectively, professors have the power to protect academic freedom and the desire to teach the truth. Let us hope they also have the will."

  • SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
    2/24/2022

    Lessons From the Struggle Against the Old McCarthyism

    by Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin

    For a Texas professor, the Lieutenant Governor's push to abolish tenure and punish faculty for teaching certain ideas calls to mind the experiences of his grandparents in the heyday of McCarthy and HUAC. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    3/15/2021

    The Forgotten Film That Paved The Way For This Year’s Oscars Contenders

    by Rebecca Prime

    For the 1968 film "Uptight!," white director Jules Dassin enlisted Ruby Dee and Julian Mayfield to remake the 1935 film "The Informer" around the Black Panther Party, a move which drew on all three principals' experiences with surveillance over political activism and provoked a sabotage effort by the FBI.

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    2/21/2021

    What the FBI Had on Grandpa

    by Molly Jong-Fast

    "I never considered my grandfather to be a danger to the republic, but J. Edgar Hoover disagreed." The FBI surveilled writer Howard Fast extensively, though, as he wrote in his autobiography, "the eleven hundred pages detailed every—or almost every—decent act I had performed in my life."

  • SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
    9/24/2020

    The Red Scare and Women in Government

    McCarthyite attacks on the political left also pushed women out of policymaking positions in the federal government, the historian Landon Storrs argues. 

  • SOURCE: History.com
    3/4/2020

    How Eisenhower Secretly Pushed Back Against McCarthyism

    To the end of his life, David A. Nichols says, “Eisenhower never admitted that the White House was behind this.” Yet he couldn’t help but gloat a bit in private. On at least one occasion, he reportedly repeated a joke that “it’s no longer McCarthyism, it’s McCarthywasm.” 

  • 10/6/19

    The New McCarthyism?

    by Andrew Feffer

    Unfortunately, the term has become almost entirely evacuated of its historical and political meaning. Historians need to set the record straight.