Mccarthyism
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While Chafe only devotes a small amount of attention to McCarthyism, he frames the issue in a different way from Rovere. In his work, Chafe is reserved in the mentioning of McCarthys name, while Roveres books content revolves around who McCarthy was and what he did to arouse the anti-Communist feeling that existed in America during the post-war years of WWII. Both Chafe and Rovere are thorough in explaining the events in American society during the post-Cold War years; however, they blame different sources for the anti-Communist feeling that took place in the late 1940s and 1950s.
In The Unfinished Journey, William Chafe states, “like a seasonal allergy, anticommunism has recurred at regular intervals throughout twentieth-century history” (p 93). In other words, Chafe makes the point that this anti- Communist feeling has been prevalent in America even before McCarthy became a powerful figure in the states. When the economy collapsed in 1933, Roosevelt was President, and he decided to make some reform in the federal government. The reform was known as The New Deal. This deal required that the federal government be involved in supervising large corporations and trade, because prior to the great depression these corporations were involved in fraudulent behavior because of lack of supervision. The federal government was also held accountable for providing citizens with a minimal standard of living, which consisted of food and shelter. The final reform was the governments attempt in promoting an equal distribution of wealth. This New Deal was also seen as part of the “Red Menace” known as communism working its way into the United States. It was Al Smith in 1936 that claimed that intellectuals around Franklin Delano Roosevelt disguised themselves as communists. In order to protect America against communism, the HUAC was established in 1938, and the Smith Act was passed allowing for prosecution to take place for anyone who advocated communism.
Many youthful idealists had been enticed into communism during the years of the depression, and many of them went on to fill important government positions; the issue soon came to be that these officials were “serving two masters” (Chafe, p.94). The possibility of U.S. government employees playing double roles caused Truman to issue the Executive order to create a Federal Employee Loyalty Program. This program gave authority to security officials to investigate two million employees of the federal government for any trace of political deviance. The explanation Chafe gives for the U.S. authority to screen officials at home was that it seemed a “logical parallel”. Since the U.S. was fighting communism in other places in the world, an honest parallel was to clean out communism in the Unites States as well. Chafe hardly mentions McCarthy in his literature to show the reader that the anti-Communist hysteria was established long before McCarthy even came to power. According to Chafe, when McCarthy decided to run for Senator he utilized the already existing fear to gain celebrity and bring down the democrats who were in office.
Rovere took a different approach than Chafe. McCarthys career began in 1950,