What effects did the "Red Scare" in the 1950s have on American society?
by 
dreamlover1989
ANSWERS: 2
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It caused the USA to spend (waste) a huge amount of it's wealth in an insane arms race. The US arms manufacturers used this time period to build up a unhealthy lobbying power inside the US governmet, even to the point of shaping US internatinal foreign policy. Outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower saw this and warned his countrymen of the "US industrial military complex". Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, inevitably, communism was collapsing under it's own weight. in the 1980's the CIA had valued the size of the Soviet economy as almost three times it's actual worth.
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First, the term "Red Scare" is misleading. It is most often used ironically, leading one to believe that there was really no justification for fearing "reds" or communists, and that claims by Senator Joe McCarty that they had infiltrated all levels of our government were entirely bogus. Nothing could be further from the truth. For the proof, one need only to refer to the Venona Project, which deciphered Soviet messages to their operatives in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VENONA_project The threat was real, not a "scare", making the question inappropriate.
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