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Unlock This Course'A Divided Union: Civil Rights in the USA, 1945-74' is one of the eight Paper 1 depth studies. You study two of them, so only work through these lessons if this is one of your chosen options.
In the late 1940s a wave of fear swept the USA. Millions of Americans came to believe that Communists were secretly working inside their own country to destroy it. This fear is called the Red Scare. Red was the colour of Communism. There had been a short Red Scare in 1919-20, after the Russian Revolution, so this one is sometimes called the Second Red Scare.
The fear was far bigger than the real danger. The American Communist Party was tiny: fewer than 100,000 members in a country of about 150 million people. So why were Americans so afraid? This lesson covers three of the main reasons: the Cold War, the FBI and a committee called HUAC. A fourth, the spy cases, is in the next lesson, Spy Cases: Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.
Key terms:
The USA and the USSR had fought on the same side in the Second World War. Within five years they were bitter rivals, and each new event abroad made Communism look stronger and closer.
After 1945 the Soviet army controlled most of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet leader Stalin used this power to help local Communists take over. By 1948 Communist governments, loyal to Stalin, ran Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. To Americans, Communism seemed to be swallowing country after country. In March 1947 President Truman promised to help any country resisting it. This policy was called containment.
Since 1945 only the USA had owned the atomic bomb, and that made Americans feel safe. In August 1949 the USSR tested its own bomb, years earlier than American experts had expected. Now American cities could be destroyed. Many people decided that spies must have handed over the secret.
In October 1949 the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, won the civil war in China. The country with the largest population in the world was now Communist. Truman's opponents in the Republican Party accused his government of 'losing' China and asked whether Communist sympathisers in Washington were to blame.
In June 1950 Communist North Korea invaded South Korea. American troops were sent to fight as part of a United Nations force. The Cold War had turned into a real war, and American soldiers were now being killed by Communist armies.
Together these shocks made Americans feel they were losing the Cold War. A frightening question followed: was the USA losing because of traitors at home?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was the national police and security service. Its director, J. Edgar Hoover, had run it since 1924 and hated Communism. He believed Communists were hidden in every part of American life, and he used his agents to gather secret files on people he suspected.
In March 1947, only nine days after his promise to contain Communism abroad, Truman ordered loyalty checks on everyone who worked for the federal (national) government. The FBI checked their backgrounds. Over the next few years about three million workers were investigated. A few hundred were sacked as 'security risks' and several thousand resigned. Not one was found to be a spy.
The checks were meant to calm fears. In fact they made them worse. If the government itself thought its own workers needed checking, ordinary people reasoned, the danger must be real. Workers could be accused on thin evidence, such as once belonging to a left-wing group, and often they were not told who had accused them.
HUAC stands for the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was a committee of the House of Representatives, part of Congress (the American parliament), set up in 1938 to investigate people thought to be disloyal. It could order anyone to appear and answer questions, and the FBI quietly supplied it with information.
In October 1947 HUAC held hearings on Hollywood. It claimed Communists in the film industry were slipping propaganda into films. Newspapers, radio and newsreel cameras covered the hearings. Some famous names, including Walt Disney and the actor Ronald Reagan, gave evidence about Communist influence.
Ten writers and directors, among them the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, were asked: 'Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?' They refused to answer. They argued that the First Amendment to the American Constitution, which protects free speech, gave them the right to keep their political beliefs private. The Hollywood Ten were or had been Party members, but that was not against the law.
Within weeks the studio bosses, afraid of losing audiences, sacked them and put them on a blacklist: a list of people no studio would employ. The Ten were also found guilty of contempt of Congress (refusing to cooperate with it) and in 1950 they went to prison for between six months and a year. The blacklist later grew to hundreds of names.
The hearings mattered because they were so public. They told Americans that Communists might be anywhere, even behind their favourite films. They also showed that refusing to answer could cost you your job and your freedom.
In this lesson's three reasons, the Cold War created the fear. The FBI and the loyalty checks turned that fear inwards, onto Americans themselves. HUAC then put it on show to the whole country. Each reason fed the next, and in an exam the best answers explain these links.
Don't say the Hollywood Ten were jailed for being Communists or spies. They were jailed for contempt of Congress, because they refused to answer. Don't say the loyalty checks proved the danger was real: they found no spies at all. And don't mix up HUAC with Senator McCarthy. HUAC belonged to the House of Representatives and McCarthy was never a member. He comes into the story in 1950 and has his own lesson, McCarthy's Methods and the Growth of Opposition.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)
In 1947 HUAC turned its hearings on Hollywood into a show trial. Hungry for headlines, the committee paraded film stars in front of the cameras and bullied writers with the same hammering question. The ten men who dared to defend their right to free speech were thrown out of work by frightened studio bosses and then hounded into prison. The committee never proved that a single Hollywood film had carried Communist propaganda.
What impression does the author give about HUAC's investigation of Hollywood? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that HUAC's investigation of Hollywood was unfair and was really about publicity, not about finding the truth. This is shown by the language used. Calling the hearings a 'show trial' suggests the result was decided in advance, and 'hungry for headlines' suggests the committee cared most about fame. Words such as 'bullied' and 'hounded' make the committee sound cruel, while the Ten are praised as men who 'dared' to defend free speech. The author has also chosen to end on the point that no propaganda was ever proved, and leaves out anything that might explain the committee's fears, such as the fact that the Ten had been Communist Party members. This selection makes the investigation seem to have had no good reason behind it.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, proves it with short quotations, and explains how the author's choice of words and of what to include and leave out creates that impression.
Don't retell the story of the Hollywood Ten. Name the impression in your first sentence, then quote loaded words such as 'show trial' and 'hounded' and say what each one suggests. Finish with what the author has left out.