MCCARTHYISM
President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9835 of March 21, 1947, required that all federal civil-service employees be screened for “loyalty”. The order said that one basis for determining disloyalty would be a finding of “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association” with any organization determined by the attorney general to be “totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive” or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”
The so-called “Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations” (AGLOSO) was one of the most central and widely publicized aspects of the post–World War II Red Scare, which has popularly become known as “McCarthyism.”
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s blacklist was a list of American people suspected of association with the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s. The people included on the blacklist were meant to be barred from employment.
From 1953 to 1955, McCarthy held 117 hearings and even more closed-door interrogations, witch hunts for subversives that thrived on guilt by association: someone had worked for a union, dates a communist, been in a book club that read a book by Marx. Author Johnson writes that reviewing the transcripts of those sessions made it clear that McCarthy, in addition to guilt by association and character assassination, was engaged in an “obsessive hunt for homosexuals,” hounded writers, artists, and composers, attacked the reputations of military leaders.
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