US citizens had to be carefull how they exercised their freedom of speech during the McCarthy era. Rumors and gossip concerning communism could get those individuals investigated as being communists.
NONSENSE!
McCarthy Vindicated At Last 12/18/2007 http://bit.ly/b2fmz8
"...These intercepted cables proved that there were over 350 Americans spying for the Soviets, and enabled investigators to identify about half of them. Joe McCarthy had access to the information contained in the top secret Venona intercepts, access given him by J. Edgar Hoover and others concerned with the extent of Soviet espionage and penetration, but he could not defend himself against charges of recklessly accusing people of being Soviet agents by revealing the source of his information without alerting the Soviets that some of their most important secrets were known to U.S. Intelligence..."
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Senator McCarthy was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, McCarthy's tactics and his inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.
As an aside, Robert F. Kennedy was once on McCarthy's staff.
Senator Joseph McCarthy's most important job was acting as a Senator. His self created role of hunting down communists in the US government helped no one and hurt many. McCarthy's tactics were finally censored. With that said, the public was made aware of the fact that many US citizens were members of the US Communist Party. This party was legal, however, many people viewed the Party's goals of creating a communist style government in the USA as dangerous.
The Red Scare.
His accusations against war heroes His televised interrogation of the army that led to censure.
He instigated a lot of accusations against people on the ground of them being communists despite there rarely ever being any solid evidence behind any of his claims. He was a senator from Wisconson. He was only stopped once he started turning his conspiracies on communism to point at the army.
For his play The Crucible. Similar to George Orwell's Animal Farm, this play pointed out a problem in society through a story that everyone could understand:It emphasized the factor of fear involved in "witch hunts" of their own day and age, and the unfairness and lack of logic or reason behind the Red Scare. Led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Red Scare involved fear of communism during the time of the Cold War. Shortly after the play was published, Miller was blacklisted for creating a work that indirectly undermined Senator McCarthy's judgment and authority.
Relations between the United States and its NATO allies and the Soviet Union and its allies during the period 1946 - 1989 were often called "the Cold War" because of the continually adversarial nature of these relations in the absence of actual armed conflict.