The euphoria that surrounded V-E and V-J days in the spring and summer of 1945 was short-lived but great while it lasted. General Motors and Ford produced nifty automobiles instead of tanks. Orchards were being bull-dozed for new housing subdivisions and women had put away their riveting tools and returned to their homes and kitchens awaiting their husbands returning from the war. The ‘baby boom’ was about to begin.
But the expectations of a ‘better tomorrow’ were soon eclipsed. The ‘Iron Curtain’ fell across Europe and ushered in the Cold War. The United States versus the Soviet Union. By 1949 the Soviets had detonated their 1st atomic bomb, and the nuclear race began. At home we built bomb shelters for unfathomable reasons. A nuclear strike would poison the land for thousands of years, but we built them, stocked them with goodies and taught our school children to ‘duck & cover.’ The paranoia grew!
In the late ‘30’s the House of Representatives established an Unamerican Activities Committee, HUAC, meant to ferret out groups unfriendly to our country, mostly Fascist and Communist. But after Pearl Harbor, it was their recommendation that interned Japanese Americans.
After the war they found a new reason to exist…naïve Americans, dupes, pinkos, red sympathizers, fellow travelers. We began to see Communists everywhere. In 1946 Richard Nixon won his first Congressional seat by painting his Democratic opponent, Jerry Voorhis, as ‘red leaning.’ The HUAC committee was emboldened and in 1947 began hearings to determine whether the Hollywood studios and the Screen Actors Guild had been infiltrated by Communists. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” It was a paralyzing question. Give us names…and names were divulged. Across the industry a schism evolved…those who cooperated and those who wouldn’t. Ten principled screenwriters and directors would not cooperate…their fate was doomed. Take the 5th and get blackballed. No work; no career; no, sir. The troglodytes won. Enter Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin.
His ascendancy began with a 1950 speech in West Virginia claiming that 57 Communists had infiltrated the State Department. While that reverberated, he won reelection and continued to investigate the CIA and other government bureaus. His celebrity and career-ending assertions, no one ever substantiated, hit its peak in 1954 with 36 days of televised hearings investigating the Army where he claimed this soldier and that one was communist. Finally, he attacked the Army’s elderly uncle-like lawyer, Joseph Welch, who rebuked him with the now ever-famous reply: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” This was followed by a scathing, detailed televised report by Edward R. Murrow. Soon thereafter, McCarthy was censured by the Senate.
The country had had enough. Eisenhower had been elected President in 1952, promising to end the Korean conflict. He’d succeeded. He deserved to be reelected in 1956. He was! The country had spoken…enough war…enough Communist-seeking craziness. Let us go back to our ticky-tack homes and our ticky-tack lives in suburbia. We’ll ignore the Berlin Wall, apartheid in South Africa, the war in Algeria, starvation in Africa…after all, Grace Kelly is marrying a real Prince.