What impact did the Cold War have on American society?
The Cold War started to develop after the Second World War when the USA and the USSR no longer had a common goal of Hitler’s Nazism. As soon as Cold War was instigated, the differences in ideology and other factors worsened the relationship between the USA and the USSR. This meant that many events such as Cuban Missile Crisis and arms race nearly led to a hot war. As Cold War progressed until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cold War had significant impact on American society.
Firstly, Cold War instigated strong anti-communism within the USA. The hatred towards Communism was so great that it eventually led to McCarthyism. During McCarthyism, Americans were obsessed with the process of identifying the Communists and removing those Communists from American society. The strength of this obsession increased greatly that Americans started to forget the fact that the US constitution guaranteed all Americans freedom to believe what they wanted to believe. The purpose of organisations such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the House Un-American Activities became the ‘removal of Communists’ and laws such as the Communist Control Act were passed to facilitate the process of identifying, capturing and removing Communists. The McCarran Act was also introduced, which forced all Communist organisations to be registered within the US government and banned Communists carrying US passports and working in defence industries. Inevitably, many were questioned without having done anything wrong, many lost their jobs and some even lost their lives like the Rosenbergs, who were blamed for having passed secret information about atomic bombs to the Soviet Union. This red scare continued to dominate the American society until late 1950s.
