We'Re Turning Again

We’re Turning Again

John Sixsmith

HIS 135

July 2, 2011

Carlo Aaron Puther

We’re Turning Again

One of the things that I enjoy the most about history is that if you wait long enough, you can see a repeat in trends, both politically and socially. I intend to illustrate this point by showing how over the past five decades, the political climate has see sawed back and forth, sometimes only taking the amount of time for one four year term of office of the President. I will show how from during the fifties to the nineties, the political climate shifted from right to left, and how the social climate did the same.

1950’s

The one event that I think is most important from the fifties were the whole House Unamerican Activities Committee meetings. The Eisenhower administration was conservative only to the point that it served their purpose which was to fight the spread of communism not only at home, but also throughout the rest of the world.

“McCartyhism” as it has come to be called, had a profound effect on the peoples of that generation. The “red scare” became a part of everybodies daily life. The period of McCarthyism began in the late 1940s and ended in the mid to late 1950s. McCarthyism came to be synonymous with the term witch-hunt, the act of making serious but unsubstantiated charges against people in public life. McCarthyism is also used today as a more all-purpose term to describe the general practice of making false allegations, specifically of pro-Communist activity and most often based on irrelevant evidence. Encylomedia(2007) It was everywhere that you looked. The House Unamerican Activities Hearings were all over that new invention that was in everybody who was anybodies home, the television. It was in the newspapers and magazines, and was even in the schools, as the government felt that it was the duty of the school systems to make sure that there were no children who were not made aware of the evils of communism. All in all, there was no escaping...