Who was the US senator responsible for the Red Scare?

Answer 1

Joe McCarthy was the big name involved in HUAC in the 60's/70's

Answer:

There are two distinct era's in the United States history that have been retroactively referred to as the "Red Scare". The first "Red Scare" was during the period of 1917-1920 and was spurred in a large part by the Russian Revolution of 1917. This combined with several highly publicized strikes by the International Workers of the World, (IWWW), starting in 1916 and lasting through 1919 helped to create a general sense of paranoia and dis-ease amongst most Americans. In April of 1919, an organized plot to mail thirty six bombs to prominent figures of the U.S. government and industry was uncovered and those who were targeted included that most respected and venerated Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. In response to this scare, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1919, and enforced this to remove "undesirables" from the United States. Rather than it being a Senator during this period who was most prominent in fanning the flames of paranoia it was instead the Attorney General Palmer, who survived the bombing of his house that killed the bomber, and instigated a number of raids known as the "Palmer Raids". These executive powered arrests and mass deportations were eventually challenged by prominent lawyers of that day, and Palmer began to lose popularity after incorrectly predicting an overthrow of the U.S. government by the communists.

The decade between 1947 and 1957 brought the United States its second "Red Scare" of which Senator Joseph McCarthy stood in the forefront. Both the Chinese Civil War of 1949 and the Korean conflict helped to escalate these fears and most notably the arrest, trial and conviction and finally the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage for the Soviet Union gave that fear a face. The development of Atomic weaponry by the Soviet Union only further escalated the fears of average Americans and then the testimonies of Elizabeth Bentley and Whitaker Chambers that Soviet spies and communist sympathizers had been successful in infiltrating high level government positions only intensified these fears leading to McCarthy's enormous popularity and eventually his downfall as the front man for the "communist witch hunts" of that era.