McCarthyism
...they developed a fear towards each others. Since the Soviets were mostly Communist the United States feared any sort of communism in the country. Communist spies were, however, a genuine threat. Though never powerful enough to influence government policy, individual Communists could easily have stolen secrets and some of them supposedly did. The spy cases of the early cold war send the message that every American Communist was, and is, potentially an espionage agent of the Soviet Union. Part myth and part reality, the notion that domestic Communists threatened national security was based on a primarily on the origin of the Communist movement (the Soviet Union). The sense of urgency that surrounded the issue of communism came from the government's attempt generalize public opinion for the cold war. Because of the struggle against the Soviet Union, anticommunism moved to the ideal mentality of the American politic and McCarthyism played an crucial role in the events. The cold war transformed domestic communism from a matter of political opinion to one of national security. As the United States' hostility toward the Soviet Union intensified, members of the Communist party became increasingly viewed as potential enemies. Since the time of the red scare led by Joseph McCarthy, the term McCarthyism has entered the American formal language as a general term for the phenomenon of mass pressure, harassment, or blacklisting used to instill conformity with prevailing political beliefs. The act of making insufficiently supported accusations or engaging in unfair investigatory methods against a person as a purported attempted to unfairly silence or discredit them is often referred to as McCarthyism. The Arthur Miller play "The Crucible", written during the McCarthy era, used the Salem trial as a metaphor for the McCarthyism of the 1950s, suggesting...