The Red Scare
House Un-American Activities Committee HUAC. The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well. They forced hundreds of workers in the US to tell them about their political beliefs. Then they had the people who announced their beliefs to testify against eachother. More than 500 people lost their jobs. These people who lost their jobs were blacklisted and couldn't get a job for around a decade. Senator Joseph McCarthy, an anti communist politician expanded the probe to investigate all federal employees to make sure they weren't communists. Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted.