ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the Red Scare,

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a not-so-practical joke to play on a bull.

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The sentiment expressed in the cartoon above is most similar

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to the rhetoric from which of the following decades?

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And here are your potential answers.

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[ growl ]

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All right, well first of all let's figure out what exactly is going on

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in this cartoon. We see a man with the label "European anarchy"

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sneaking up behind the Statue of Liberty holding a bomb.

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We also see the caption "Come unto me,

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ye opprest." And the year is 1919.

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So that means we're dealing with post-World War I,

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right around the time the Russian revolutionaries formed

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their first communist government.

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Well, U.S. politicians kind of freaked out about the whole communist thing,

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since they worried the same sort of labor-driven revolt

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could happen here at home.

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As a result, the first Red Scare was born,

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leading to the restriction of immigration from countries

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suspected of communist sympathies

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and of suppressing civil liberties.

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Now let's figure out which decade in our answers shared

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a similar sentiment. Was this sentiment most similar

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to rhetoric from the A - 1930s?

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Well, remember the stock market crash in 1929?

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Many people read that as the failure of capitalism.

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So the 1930s actually saw a growing tolerance

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for alternative economic ideas. That eliminates A.

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Was the rhetoric similar to the C -

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1960s? Well, by the 1960s, we were

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well into the Cold War, and the nation's focus was more on

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Cuba, Vietnam, and other external threats, rather than

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communists here at home. Same goes for the 1970s,

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so that knocks out C and D. Which means that this

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anti-communist rhetoric most lines up with

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B - the 1950s. If you thought the first Red Scare

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was bad, the second Red Scare in the 50s was even worse.

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Senator Joseph McCarthy went after everyone with

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a dissenting opinion in Congress, and the rest of the U.S. government,

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using the communist label to ruin careers and remove

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threats to his own personal legacy.

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So the correct answer is B. Many of McCarthy's accusations

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ended up being untrue, but you know what they say,

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"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice,

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you're a communist witch."

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[ witch laugh ]

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