So in order to recap how we got to what became known as the "McCarthy era", we need to take a look at recent events. 
Many events occurred before Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to national fame.
There was first the breakdown of the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, and President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order in 1947 to screen federal employees for possible association with organizations deemed "totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive", or potentially advocating "to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means."
Then, you had Czechoslovak coup by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which heightened concern in the West about Communist parties seizing power and the possibility of subversion.
In 1949, a high-level State Department official was convicted of perjury in a case of espionage, and the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb.
The Korean War started the next year, significantly raising tensions and fears of impending communist upheavals in the United States.
In a speech in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of members of the Communist Party USA working in the State Department, which attracted substantial press attention, and the term McCarthyism was published for the first time in late March of that year in The Christian Science Monitor, along with a political cartoon by Herblock in The Washington Post.
 
So there is the quick intro, and Jeananne will pick up all of the details of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare.
 
there is always more to learn!
Jimmy & Jean

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