Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Liberal reforms soon became a spurious justification for the rise of McCarthyism.
Child labour laws and women’s suffrage could then be referred to as “Communist” or “Red
Plots”, provoking some turmoil in the New Deal policies of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt. His New Deal, in response to the depression, was then perceived as socialism or
communism by many conservatives. Its policies in turn were allegedly seen as communist
infiltration by communist policy-makers in the Roosevelt administration.
Lincoln Day, February 9, 1950, marked an important moment in the American
history when Joseph McCarthy presented a list of known communists working for the State
Department. In his speech, he is usually quoted as saying: “I have here in my hand a list of
205 – a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of
the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the
State Department”. This speech gave rise to a flood of press attention and catapulted
McCarthy into the political forefront.
There were many different offices in federal, state and local government whose job
was to control and inspect businesses and companies in general and check whether there
was any communist involvement. They created committees, so-called “loyalty review
boards”, and these would examine and prosecute what they held to be Communist
activities. The HUAC was one (amongst a number of Senate committees) of the most
prominent bodies to look into these activities. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, was not
only one of the nation’s most zealous anti-communists, but also a very overbearing
personality, who designed the loyalty-security programme for President Truman. This
programme was calculated actively to face the communist threats and locate the many
thousands of government and non-government workers involved in this kind of political
activity. It is believed that for this specific purpose of investigation the number of FBI
agents more than doubled resulting in one of the biggest assignments ever undertaken by
the American government and the Federal Bureau. The whole process, however, of crossexamining
people without them knowing the identity of the people who were accusing
them (or the nature of the accusations) meant that some of these investigations were
engaged in illegally and the final result is that many people lost their livelihoods without
having any right of appeal.
The reason why the HUAC is particularly relevant in the context of this work is that
it was not only the most well-known and active government committee (created in 1938
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