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Compare And Contrast The Crucible And The Second Red Scare

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The Second Red Scare occurred during the early 1950s in America just after the Second World War. This event is what inspired the term McCarthyism, which refers to the defamation of people's character or reputation by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations, especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges. The then senator of Wisconsin, Senator Joseph McCarthy inspired this term because he was the biggest supporter and campaigner of the anti-communist propaganda that took America by storm during the late 1940s. After top secret information about the government’s weapons was handed to the soviet union by an unknown infiltrator, popular fear of communist agenda taking over the American government lead to the then President of the states issuing an executive order known as “The Loyalty Order”. This order allowed a federal organisation known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthy to carry out mandatory investigation of all federal workers to …show more content…

In The Crucible, when a person was accused of being a witch, the accused was sentenced by the word of the person who had accused them and on the account of spectral evidence. This simply refers to the accuser’s testimony that the spirit of the accused had approached the accuser while their body was elsewhere. This method of conducting trials is unreasonable and unjust because the accused have no way of defending themselves. Similarly, during the Second Red Scare when the HUAC investigated a person who was thought to be a communist, they didn’t consider the person’s civil rights and conducted their investigations without any justification for the accusation. If the accused wouldn’t answer their questions and refuse to name other people, they lost their jobs, were blacklisted and maybe would have even been arrested for contempt against the

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