POLISH OATH OF LOYALTY 1953 SERIES

“ In the 1940s, the (National Security Agency) NSA had a top-secret program called Venona which intercepted (and much later decoded) messages between Moscow and its American agents. In more recent years, it has been discovered that even a “paranoid” like Senator McCarthy had real enemies. Among more mainstream scholars…the forces of domestic anti-communism were described largely as manifestations of social underdevelopment and popular irrationality, not legitimate concern.”

It has been dogma for many years that “McCarthyism” and the “Red Scare” of the 1950s led to the blacklisting of many innocent government workers, screenwriters and other citizens. “liberals and leftists held the high ground in the dispute over whether a communist conspiracy actually existed in the United States or was simply a by-product of ‘the paranoid style in American politics’…(t)here were rancorous divisions on the liberal-left in the 1950s over who was a spy and who was an accused innocent, who was a secret communist political operative and who was a straightforward fighter for social justice…In the upmarket universities and other places where the dominant form of polite liberalism thrived, the accusers, who had named names and had pointed out the communist spies, were scorned as despicable vermin. “A special subcommittee investigated McCarthy’s charges and rejected them as ‘a fraud and a hoax.'” Further, “(i)n 1954 a confrontation with the army led to the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings, which tarnished McCarthy’s public image, undermined his charges, and prompted his censure by the U.S.

POLISH OATH OF LOYALTY 1953 SERIES

In particular, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) is best remembered for claiming in 1950 that he had “a list of known Communists still working in the Department of State…(w)hen McCarthy became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, he launched a series of investigations into alleged subversion and espionage.” James Reichley, States in Crisis: Politics in Ten American States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), ch.10 Baltimore Sun 2 Nov.1950, p.6 Heale, ‘Red Scare Politics’, pp.29–30.Some readers may be old enough to remember the so-called “witch hunt” of Communist party members and sympathizers during the 1950s. Cresap, Party Politics in the Golden State (Los Angeles, 1954) Weaver, Warren: The Man, The Court, The Era (Boston, 1967), pp.95–6 Baltimore Sun, 2 Nov.1950 Sacramento Bee, 8 Jan.1951 Long, ‘Earl Warren’, pp.68–9.ĭean R.

Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. Hyman, To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), pp.15, 57–8, 85, 139–250, 259 State of New York, Revolutionary Radicalism… (Albany, 1920), pt.1, vol.1, p.16 Brown, Jr, Loyalty and Security: Employment Tests in the United States ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958 ), pp. Edmund Reutter, Jr, The School Administrator and Subversive Activities (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1951), pp.6–48 Solomon Golat to ACLU, 16 Sept.1953, Box 1043, Folder 18, ACLU Records, Seeley G. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963).ĪCLU, Thirty-Fourth Annual Report, 1953–1954 (New York, 1954), p.35 ĪCLU, Thirtieth Annual Report (1951), p.23 Į.

Polish oath of loyalty 1953