The origin of "McCarthyism"

McCarthyism encompassed far more than the theatrical journalism of Senator Joseph McCarthy or the spectacle of televised hearings. One lesser-known fact is that the coercive infrastructure long pre-dated McCarthy himself. The House Un-American Activities Committee had already existed since 1938, and the Smith Act of 1940 criminalised radical advocacy years before the senator rose to prominence. In 1947, President Truman institutionalised a federal loyalty-security program through Executive Order 9835, requiring ideological screening for more than three million government employees. By the time McCarthy entered the national spotlight in 1950, a bureaucratic framework for political surveillance already operated at full scale.

The time period that changed the world forever

During the Cold War, the defining characteristics of McCarthyism included political repression, the deliberate cultivation of fear about the threat of Communism inside the United States. In this particular time period, there was widespread suspicion that Soviet espionage networks were infiltrating American institutions. U.S. citizens accused of being Communists, or merely having indirect associations with Communist activity, became targets of hostile interrogations before government-controlled committees, panels, and investigative bodies.

Everything began with the First Red Scare (1917–1920), when the world witnessed the emergence of Communism as a divisive political force spreading through labour organising, mass strikes, and anarchist ideology. Alongside the search for alternatives to capitalism during the Great Depression, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) experienced a surge in membership—reaching approximately 75,000 in the 1940s at its peak. After the Second World War, the tensions between the U.S. and its past ally intensified. The Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, breaking Washington’s monopoly on nuclear weapons. In East Asia, Mao Zedong’s forces defeated the Chinese Nationalists and established the People’s Republic of China.

By 1950, new revelations heightened fears of Soviet intelligence operations. In Britain, theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to espionage while working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. In the United States, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested in 1950 for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and executed in 1953—an event that electrified public opinion and solidified the conviction that enemies were hiding within.

During the height of McCarthyism, the FBI became the single most important institution in America’s anti-Communist crusade. A series of illegal tactics were deployed to extract intelligence about suspected Communist networks, including break-ins, warrantless surveillance, wiretapping, and postal interception. The National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a left-leaning professional organisation, was one of the few groups willing to defend individuals accused under anti-Communist prosecutions. As a result, it became a direct target of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Between 1947 and 1951, the organisation’s offices were burglarised by the FBI at least fourteen times.

The chilling effect on academia

The suppression of academic freedom during the McCarthy era was neither symbolic nor incidental; it became a coordinated campaign to discipline intellectual life. Universities, traditionally insulated from partisan pressure by norms of autonomy, were drawn directly into the ideological battlefield. Beginning in the late 1940s, universities mandated loyalty oaths requiring faculty to swear allegiance to the United States and disclaim support for the Communist Party. The most infamous case occurred at the University of California in 1949–1950, where the Board of Regents demanded that every professor affirm they were not members of any organisation advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. Those who refused were dismissed. Not until later decisions, Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), did the Court finally declare that academic freedom was a “special concern of the First Amendment,” invalidating loyalty-oath requirements. But by then, two decades of damage had already narrowed academic horizons.

Structural consequences for U.S. social sciences

As a result, political science in the 1950s shifted decisively toward quantitative behavioralism. By focusing on survey data and voter behaviour instead of structural power, political scientists could study “politics without ideology.” This was not only an intellectual trend but a survival mechanism - Marxist theory, class analysis, and critiques of capitalism were methodologically screened out. Sociology turned toward consensus theory, exemplified by Talcott Parsons and structural functionalism. The implicit message: conflict is pathological; social harmony is normal. Such frameworks aligned neatly with Cold War ideology.

In short, McCarthyism reshaped academic disciplines—not through explicit censorship alone, but by rewarding depoliticised scholarship and marginalising dissent.

Was domestic communism really a threat to the U.S.?

This was an era of institutional violations and political repression justified under the language of national security. The central question remains: was domestic Communism truly the most existential threat to the American republic? Even if a degree of threat existed, it was marginal compared to the scale of the extreme counter-measures. The reaction became so disproportionate that the harm inflicted outweighed the danger supposedly being contained. First, the scale of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) did not justify the narrative of existential threat. At its 1940s high point, the party had approximately 75,000 members in a country of more than 140 million people—roughly 0.05% of the population. Many members were intellectuals, trade unionists, or individuals disillusioned with capitalism during the Great Depression rather than direct Soviet supporters. Even internal FBI memoranda repeatedly acknowledged CPUSA’s major organisational weakness, factionalism, and limited electoral influence, making it strategically marginal.

Secondly, from a national-security standpoint, the United States held overwhelming structural advantages that made domestic Communism negligible. By 1950, the U.S. controlled the world’s largest economy, possessed nuclear capability, and exercised global alliance leadership through NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions. No plausible domestic uprising could have destabilised this architecture. The real geopolitical competition with the USSR took place on the Eurasian frontier—not in American trade unions or faculty lounges. Yet the U.S. government reallocated extraordinary resources toward internal policing rather than structural diplomacy or economic competition.

If demagogues can emerge during moments of national anxiety—mobilising patriotism as a weapon to persecute powerless or marginalised groups—what guarantees do Americans have that such abuses will not occur again?