McCarthyism

Hysteria is the cause of many major atrocities in history; it has the power to call a group of docile peace-loving individuals into action, causing a metamorphosis from this previous state of calm into a heaving thriving mob of zealotry, engulfed in anger and fear. One such event was the anxious finger pointing of a modern day witch-hunt known as the McCarthy trials. The trials were more or less an offshoot of anti-communist sentiment by the newly enflamed cold war that was embodied by the red scare’s new poster child: Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, a republican senator from Wisconsin, offered a veritable plethora of suspected communist sympathizers with an unequivocal lack of evidence for these charges. He drove an entire group of people to believe that the communist party was flourishing in their own societies, to the point of which people were suspecting even the president of being a communist supporter.
 
 Joseph McCarthy’s trail of treacherous false claims of treason lasted from 1950 until 1954 when the senator overstepped the boundaries of his clout when he accused a high ranking general who was obviously innocent of doing the unthinkable dirty deed of the day; espionage for the communists. This is not however, to say that he by any means did not have the brutal masses baying at the moon for the indictment of such prominent figures as Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Kinsey, and the playwright Arthur Miller, who went on to write a satire about this incident. He managed to hold popular support until he was the downfall of his own frenzy, claiming that the observably innocent were guilty, this lead to his political impotence. He then faded off into a life of obscurity where he became a drunkard, and eventually died of liver disease. His panic-induced theories of communist support in America were both his power and his hubris.

The importance of the McCarthy trials are not only found in their historical context, but also in their lessons of what anxious fear can drive a previously logical and calm society into doing. This is a blaring illustration of what can be accomplished by any hysteria which has a frenzied mob in a kind of fear in which self-preservation is the only motivation for which to do anything.