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Lgbt discrimination throughout the years
Lgbt discrimination throughout the years
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Lgbt discrimination throughout the years
Lgbt discrimination throughout the years
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
It was a scare that communism would come to the U.S. Many people were very worried and many in the government
Anyone could be a spy and the threat of communism was all anyone would talk of think about. Although communism was such a major problem in the U.S. at the time, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration did not help to end the fear, rather fuel
Those people were guards of a certain place that they wanted to rob and the guards refused to let them in. the red scare started because there was a lot of war people who needed jobs and a lot of immigrants working the jobs that they could be working. And everyone thought that the immigrants should not be allowed to come to United States if there was not enough jobs for everyone. So the people
This and the fear of communism inside the government made them fire anybody who they thought was gay or a
In the beginning of the Cold War, President Truman signed an executive order to investigate all employment of the Federal Government(Document 1). Audience for this order was not only people who hire people for Federal Government jobs, but also citizens. Even though the United States officially tried to ban communism, the President suggested eliminating communist ideas from society which instilled fear of communism. HUAC established in 1938 also increased the fear of communism by investigating communist(Document 2). This picture shows that HUAC uses its power to accuse people and spread the fear of “being communist”.
In the late 1940s and during the 1950s Americans suffered from both a cultural and political hysteria that was caused by panic and anxiety about the Soviet threat. Many Americans believed that there were communists working within America to weaken the country. Thousands of Americans citizens, from teachers, actors and trade unionists to high level government officials, were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers, and were investigated and questioned in front of government committees and agencies. Their association with communism was often exaggerated and many people lost their jobs or were imprisoned based on inconclusive and at times fictitious evidence. The ‘Red Scare’ that occurred in the United States during this period in
Imagine losing everything: your job, family, and good name all because of someone accusing you of something that there is no sound evidence for. Now imagine people losing their lives for insubstantial reasons, and anyone who spoke out against these would lose everything themselves. Wouldn’t corruption reign from personal vengeance and create an aura of hysteria? Readers see this exact effect in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as well as in the historical event of The Lavender Scare, in both of which people were wrongfully castigated for unjustifiable accusations. The Crucible and The Lavender Scare were both similar and different.
There was widespread fear that secret communism spies would come in and infiltrate the country without the people knowing. The United States citizens though these spies would destroy the country from the inside out so this fear forced immigration bans to be placed on people coming from communist countries or their allies. Even Senator Joseph McCarthy talks of the threat and fear of internal communism to be a menace in 1950. He wrote, “As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without, but rather enemies from within.” Every United States citizen was fearful of this happening so they were not hesitant to expose anything that they believed could lead to communism playing into the mass hysteria.
The 1920s were affected by a terrible amount of pressure. The Red Scare was an era of suspicion of communist activity in the United States. The Red Scare had its roots in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which created a Communist government in Russia and inspired similar movements in other parts of the world. During this time, the government and media were worried about anyone seen as a threat caused by a communist uprising. The government passed laws such as the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants from certain countries, and the Sedition Act of 1918, which punished any form of retaliation against the U.S. government.
In the context of the Lavender Scare, people who were assumed to be queer were prosecuted by the government, and not just the people they were surrounded by. During the Lavender Scare, people were unfairly judged by who they were, and, because of the stigma that was created around homosexuality, were involuntarily pushed out of society and separated from the environment they were comfortable in and the people they were comfortable being around. This is similar to what happened to the people accused of witchcraft in The Crucible. In the play, anyone who was accused of witchcraft was arrested and even if they were acquitted they were still seen as a bad person by the community. However, the stigma associated with that person did not end after they were executed.
Body Paragraph 1: Political Developments The Red Scare caused a political shift in the US as the government, in an attempt to combat the perceived threat of communism, passed several laws that restricted civil liberties. One example is the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to criticize the government. "The Sedition Act of 1918…made it a federal crime to use disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government, the flag, or the armed forces," (MTSU). This law was used to suppress dissent and prosecute those who opposed the government's policies.
In 1950s United States, open homosexuality was taboo and legislature in every state had passed anti-sodomy laws. U.S. politicians in the McCarthy Era viewed being gay as tantamount to antinationalism. Gays were perceived as a threat to national
McCarthy had a list of people that were allegedly communist. In reality, most of them were nothing but alcoholics or drug addicts. Regardless, McCarthy pushed through and became the chairman of the government committee on the operation of the investigations. He continued the investigations for two years questioning many people in the government. During this panic, it became a witch-hunt of communist.
The American people feared the spread of communism and nuclear war in the aftermath of the Second World War, while President Eisenhower addressed these fears by having strong domestic and foreign policies. The fear of communism carved a deep sense of mistrust in American people. They believed anything that was said and blindly followed people who were in political power without any basis of evidence. The fear of communism created a sense of “hysteria” (Document A) within the general public and even in people in government.
The fear caused by the Cold War caused people to want control anything they could, because they felt like they had no control over their enemies. This led to people trying to control the gender norms of the United States during the Cold War. Smith says, “The fear of conspiracy, which historians have long identified with radical right or left politics, in fact permeated the mainstream of American life, serving as a means to regulate, if not control, social change” (Smith 309). From this quotation one can see that the fear of the unknown and conspiracy caused Americans to want control over social change and more specifically gender. Smith even goes as far to say that, “By 1947, the Cold War had made the United States a new and permanent national-security state with substantial power to manipulate attitudes towards gender, sexual behaviour, and disease” (308 Smith).