American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
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        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, American Realities, Volume Two: 
Historical Episodes from Reconstruction to the Present, Chapter Eleven

                         "McCarthyism Political Cartoons" courtesy of the Library of Congress

11. The Cold War
       Joseph McCarthy and Anticommunism

Picture

Summary

The career of Joseph McCarthy displays anti-Communism as a force in American history, particularly inthe decade following World War II. The article portrays Joseph McCarthy as an “all-American boy” whose career both shaped and was shaped by the Anti-communist movement. It also suggests that although freedom of speech is sometimes curtailed in the United States, the limitations tend to create their own reactions, as in the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Author reads from the Text

American anticommunism began in the nineteenth century, before the world had its first Communist nation. After Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto in Germany in 1848, his ideas circulated rapidly in Europe and the United States. Marx’s claim that the laborers of the world were cheated out of their fair share of industrial profits inspired a socialist movement in the United States during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The movement grew into several parties, diverse in program but alike in holding that the instruments of industrial production, distribution, and exchange should be owned by the people as a whole and managed cooperatively for the benefit of all rather than competitively for the benefit of a few. They looked at men like Andrew Carnegie as greedy oppressors: Why should Carnegie earn $25 million a year, when his workers earned less than $1,000?

The socialists advocated radical restructuring of American society. They ran several impressive presidential campaigns beginning in 1910, polling nearly a million votes for their candidate, Eugene V. Debs. But neither the socialists nor the Communist Party, which was formed later, could make much headway against a deep American antipathy toward what they regarded as foreign ideologies. Naturally the “captains of industry” were unfriendly to any doctrine that would deprive them of their wealth; most believed that business success was a reward from God for hard work. By 1900 they were already using the term “Communist” to condemn those who favored an income tax. And American workers, who might have supported socialism, were so imbued with the ideal of success through individual initiative that most regarded socialism and communism as exotic foreign doctrines, designed for people who were lazy and subversive, and not for American farmers and factory workers.


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Chapter 10: Total War
Chapter 12: The Civil Rights Movement