Opinion on Long and Short Term Effects of Mccarthyism.
In the 1950s, the United States was involved in a cold war with the Soviet Union. Due to this, Americans became suspicious and well concerned about communism expansion in the U.S. As a result, President Truman allowed McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin, to lead the interrogation of Communist spies. However, McCarthy accused many innocent people with little evidence. When people realized what he was doing, they called it McCarthyism. There was a price to pay in the effort to expose communism. Thousands of people lost their jobs, never got hired, or were blacklisted. As a result, people decided to keep their opinions private so they wouldn’t be accused of being a Communist. I believe that the short-term and long-term effects of McCarthyism were not necessary. The short-term effects of McCarthyism consist of labeling and naming, immediate accusation, proven guilty with barely any proof, and being unemployed from jobs. I think that the short term effects were really unfair to those who were accused. There was really no evidence against them, and they were guilty because ‘’they’re obviously a communist’’. The people of that time period are too gullible when it comes to accusations of Communists. There was no prove, and they only believed McCarthy because their fear of communism expansion. The long-term effects of McCarthyism consist of not being able to get hired after being added to the blacklist, and were usually never accepted back to society. The long-term effects were pretty harsh to me. Even if the one who was accused were to be proven innocent, they were never accepted back to society, which is just not fair. They weren’t guilty in the first place, so why should their lives, their whole future that’s ahead of them be ruined? That was just how it was back then and is still sort of like that today. In my opinion, the long-term effects were harsher than short-term effects because of the time periods. Other than that, the effects were similar, both