Who was the US senator responsible for the Red Scare?
The decade between 1947 and 1957 brought the United States its second “Red Scare” of which Senator Joseph McCarthy stood in the forefront. Both the Chinese Civil War of 1949 and the Korean conflict helped to escalate these fears and most notably the arrest, trial and conviction and finally the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage for the Soviet Union gave that fear a face. The development of Atomic weaponry by the Soviet Union only further escalated the fears of average Americans and then the testimonies of Elizabeth Bentley and Whitaker Chambers that Soviet spies and communist sympathizers had been successful in infiltrating high level government positions only intensified these fears leading to McCarthy’s enormous popularity and eventually his downfall as the front man for the “communist witch hunts” of that era.
