Major Events In American Politics

American politics are an ever changing thing, going from things such as Republican to Democrat with a single election, or from being under rule of England to becoming a free nation. A special time in American politics is the time period after WWII. Although there were three major events that had changed American politics, only two events drastically changed them. The first is the known as the “silent majority”, one of the major reasons why Richard Nixon was re-elected. The second is anticommunism in the 1940’s, also known as McCarthyism or the second Red Scare. These two events had shaped American politics in two ways, one being that it had aided in Nixon’s re-election, and the second being that many people were being accused of being something

Joseph McCarthy is one of the main reasons why the Second Red Scare had become such a big and bad thing. During the McCarthy era, thousands of Americans were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The main targets of these suspicions were government employees, people who were in the entertainment industry, teachers, and union activists. Many people suffered the loss of their jobs, some of them were even arrested. Another way that McCarthyism had changed American politics was through HUAC, a committee that was originally made in 1938, but was brought back into the light when McCarthy used it to investigate possible Soviet spies, or communists, that could have been infiltrating the U.S. The last major reason how McCarthyism had changed American politics is the blacklists. Although the blacklists started out with ten Hollywood actors and such the employers who were worried that their employees might be communist spies would still have people, such as HUAC, investigate certain employees. Employees who were thought to be communist would be put on the blacklist and would not be able to get a job anywhere. After analyzing the provided evidence anticommunism can be deemed as the event that had affected American politics in a more minor way compared to the “silent