ABSTRACT
In New York a former New Dealer, Alger Hiss, had been named by Whittaker Chambers as the transmitter to the Reds of classified State Department documents; and within six weeks of Harry Truman’s upset victory, Hiss was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of perjury. Internal communism, hinted at when Truman had instituted the federal Loyalty-Security Program in 1947, had created national paranoia. The millions of Americans who considered the suddenly famous Senator a savior of the free world also welcomed the passage of the Internal Security Act of 1951 that provided for the registration, internment and exclusion from war plants of American Communists in case of a national emergency. Campaigning in Joe McCarthy’s home state, he told a Beloit crowd that McCarthy’s demands for an investigation of the State Department were “fully justified” by its “pro-Communst policies.”.
