Was McCarthy right?

[Neil Foxlee]

Joe, that is. A programme that might ruffle your (and my) constructs:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t7hhf.

[AndyM]

I think I'll stay unruffled. The extent of espionage, in all directions, should surprise nobody, but McCarthy's main legacy was fostering a climate of persecution, betrayal and small-minded suspicion of anything outside the narrow confines of normativity. That legacy is alive and well in the anti-Obama hysteria and teabaggery.

[Hugh Weldon]

Wasn't McCarthy's going after movie stars taking it a little too far? Or perhaps a savvy intervention in cultural politics?

Certainly sounds worth a look. We all know of course how much anti-Communism was at the centre of US policy, but I've always wondered what precisely the nature and scope of Soviet ambitions were, and the grey area where the spreading of ideology bordered on empire building and power politics.

[Philellinas]

A list of some of the victims of the latter-day Inquisition. Judge for yourselves:-

A few of the more notable people who were blacklisted or suffered some other persecution during McCarthyism are listed here:
Nelson Algren, writer
Elmer Bernstein, composer and conductor
Leonard Bernstein, composer and conductor
Charlie Chaplin, actor and director
Aaron Copland, composer
Bartley Crum, attorney
Howard Da Silva, actor
Jules Dassin, director
Dolores del Río, actress
W. E. B. Du Bois, civil rights activist and author
Howard Fast, writer
John Garfield, actor
Jack Gilford, actor
Ruth Gordon, actress
Lee Grant, actress
Dashiell Hammett, author
Elizabeth Hawes, clothing designer, author, equal rights activist
Lillian Hellman, playwright
Lena Horne, singer
Langston Hughes, writer
Sam Jaffe, actor
Garson Kanin, writer and director
Gypsy Rose Lee, actress and ecdysiast
Cornelius Lanczos, mathematician and physicist
Arthur Laurents, playwright
Philip Loeb, actor
Joseph Losey, director
Burgess Meredith, actor
Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist
Zero Mostel, actor
J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist, scientific director of the Manhattan Project
Dorothy Parker, writer
Linus Pauling, chemist, winner of two Nobel prizes
Martin Ritt, actor and director
Paul Robeson, actor, athlete, singer, writer, political and civil rights activist
Edward G. Robinson, actor
Waldo Salt, screenwriter
Pete Seeger, folk singer
Artie Shaw, jazz musician
Irwin Shaw, writer
William L. Shirer, journalist
Paul Sweezy, economist and founder-editor of Monthly Review
Tsien Hsue-shen, physicist
Orson Welles, actor, writer, and director

[Neil Foxlee]

I'm certainly not defending McCarthy's hounding of the likes of the above and I'm not a fan of David Aaronovitch. However, I'll suspend judgement on the programme itself and its findings until I hear it.

[Des]

Have you a view of your own?

[Neil Foxlee]

As it happened, I only caught a bit of the programme, so I can't really comment. What I can say is that the probably badly-phrased question which I used as a thread subject didn't relate to McCarthy's witch-hunt, but to whether there were - as he suspected - a significant number of undercover Communist agents operating in the US at the time. That's what the programme was about.