"McCarythism" actually is a misnomer -- the witch hunt began in the Truman Administration.
***** Since 1947 the Truman Administration had increasingly resorted to a rhetoric of crusading anti-Communism in order to arouse public support for its policy of containment. In speech after speech, the President and other Administration spokesmen stressed American omnipotence and innocence, Soviet depravity, and the subversive nature of the Soviet threat. Thus, in a March 17, 1948, nationwide radio broadcast, Truman described the international situation as a morally dichotomous struggle between good and evil. "We must not be confused about the issue which confronts the world today," he declared. "...It is tyranny against freedom." "...even worse," he continued, "Communism denies the very existence of God." Or again, as in a May 11, 1950, address at Gonzaga University, Truman charged that "The greatest obstacle to peace is a modern tyranny led by a small group who have abandoned their faith in God." Stressing American righteousness and omnipotence, he concluded that "Our effort to resist and overcome this tyranny is essentially a moral effort.... In everything we do, at home and abroad, we must demonstrate our clear purpose, and our firm will, to build a world order in which men everywhere can walk upright and unafraid, and do the work of God."
At the same time, the Truman Administration sought to brand critics of its policies, both those on the left and the right, as irrational or even disloyal. In September 1946 Truman privately denounced Henry Wallace as a dreamer who "wants us to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets, and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo.... The Reds, phonies, and the 'parlor pinks' seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger." During the 1948 campaign, the Administration sought, in the words of Clark Clifford, "to identify [Wallace] and isolate him in the public mind with the Communists." As then Democratic National Chairman J. Howard McGrath bluntly put it, "a vote for Wallace...is a vote for the things for which Stalin, Molotov, and Vishinsky stand." Truman would later publicly attack McCarthy as "the greatest asset that the Kremlin has" and denounce Republican "isolationism" as an attempt to "sabotage the foreign policy of the United States [which] is just as bad in the cold war as it would be to shoot our soldiers in the back in a hot war."
At home, Administration spokesmen stressed the gravity of the threat of Communist subversion and called for measures that would insure absolute security. When speaking around the country in 1949 and 1950, Truman's Attorney General, J. Howard McGrath, sought to arouse the public to recognize the all-pervasive menace of Communism. He urged those who believed "in God's law and the dignity of human personality" to take up the "modern struggle against pagan Communist philosophies that seek to enslave mankind." Warning against the subtle subversion of students' minds by their teachers, he emphasized the need to invite anti- Communist speakers onto the college campuses and to ensure that anti-Communist books were promoted in local bookstores. Communists, the Attorney General warned, were "everywhere--in factories, offices, butcher shops, on street corners, in private businesses--and each carries in himself the germs of death for society." They were "busy at work," he pointed out, "undermining your government, plotting to destroy the liberties of every citizen, and feverishly trying, in whatever they can, to aid the Soviet Union."
In a similar fashion in 1947 the Truman Administration had legitimized Red-baiting at home through its loyalty program (which applied sweeping standards to all federal employees, not just those in sensitive positions), its compilation and public release of the so-called Attorney General's list (which, based on the concept of guilt by association, became the most widely used litmus for confirming "subversive tendencies"), and through its public quest for total internal security (which raised an impossible standard by which the Administration itself would subsequently be judged and found wanting). . . .
<http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/theoharis.html> *****
Anyhow, diehard CPUSA members may not have resigned from the party until 1956 or even later despite anticommunist pressures, but closet party membership after 1947 didn't make any difference, as public activities of the CPUSA as a political party were curtailed, CPUSA members and other suspects of "disloyalty" were purged from employment and public political life and otherwise attacked, etc., beginning in 1947 or thereabout.
At the same time, the cult of domesticity destroyed the gains that women made during wartime manpower shortage, and homophobia intensified -- it should be noted that anticommunism came hand in hand with conservative gender and sexual agendas as well. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>