On this day, May 2, 1957, Joseph McCarthy, the controversial U.S. Senator, dies at the age of 48 due to alcohol-related illnesses (probably cirrhosis of the liver). Mccarthy was notorious
On this day, May 2, 1957, Joseph McCarthy, the controversial U.S. Senator, dies at the age of 48 due to alcohol-related illnesses (probably cirrhosis of the liver). Mccarthy was notorious for his anti-communist rhetoric and for making deceitful, biased and insubstantial accusations towards his political opponents, charging them with subversion and philo-communism. This practice would eventually take his name and would widely be known as McCarthyism.
The era of McCarthyism would not have ever been if within the American society there wasn’t a thirty-year escalating deep fear of communism which Joseph McCarthy cunningly exploited. The roots of this prominent anti-communist period in America are found in the theories that ignited the October Russian Revolution of 1917 in Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power. The Bolsheviks, founded by Vladimir Lenin, were armed with a new radical ideology, communism.
The First Red Scare
After the end of World War I, the United States faced the negative effects of the war. Inflation rates were on the rise, workers were confronted with the reduction of their wages, unemployment, and poverty. The labor unions resisted and in the years during the Russian Revolut