{"id":132,"date":"2010-11-14T16:23:08","date_gmt":"2010-11-14T16:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/?p=132"},"modified":"2018-03-20T12:49:50","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T12:49:50","slug":"reassessing-the-red-scare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/2010\/11\/14\/reassessing-the-red-scare\/","title":{"rendered":"Reassessing the Red Scare"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Senator Joseph McCarthy<\/p><\/div>\n

Was Senator Joseph McCarthy a lying, demagogue bent on destroying American civil liberties?\u00a0 Or was McCarthy instead a determined foe of dangerous Communist spies during the early 1950s?\u00a0 H.W. Brands calls McCarthy a “virtuoso of the political attack” who “tapped into anxieties current in the American psyche,” but also acknowledges that some of those “anxieties were perfectly rational” (52-53).\u00a0 Students in History 118 need to review the evidence themselves and offer their tentative conclusions.\u00a0 What were the principal causes of the intensifying “Red Scare” of the late 1940s and early 1950s?\u00a0 How should Americans describe this era and what lessons, if any, seem most relevant?\u00a0 The issue has special relevance for Dickinson College since the school was censured in 1956 by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for firing an economics professor (Laurent LaVallee) for invoking the Fifth Amendment when he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities (HUAC) committee.\u00a0 See this article<\/a> from the Chicago Tribune <\/em>and also this background<\/a> from the Lionel Lewis’ book, Cold War on Campus <\/em>(available through Google Books).\u00a0 Brands also explains the impact of the Korean War on the Cold War and how containment doctrine began to evolve in dangerous new ways under President Eisenhower.\u00a0 Students in History 118 should be able to describe and explain the significance of covert operations in the mid-1950s, for example, and special items like the Doolittle report of 1954.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n