Intolerance of Communists During the McCarthy Era

A General Model

Bibliographic Data

ID3386573
AuthorsMark Peffley (0000-0002-7841-0654, University of Kentucky), Lee Sigelman (University of Arizona)
Year1990
Volume43
Issue1
Pages93
Publication date1990-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Western Political Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-4078 • E-ISSN: 2325-8675
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/448507
OpenAlexW4244364446
LanguageEN
Citations received34
References cited25

IN Communism, Conformity, and Civzl Liberties, published in 1955, Samuel Stouffer undertook the first truly systematic analysis of political tolerance, one of the core components of democracy, and reached some unsettling conclusions about the prevalence of intolerance in the United States. In an attempt to determine the degree of willingness to tolerate nonconformists such as people whose loyalty has been (Stouffer 1955: 21), Stouffer embedded a battery of questions about the rights of communists, socialists, and atheists--the bogeymen of the McCarthy era-in a pair of specially-commissioned national surveys. Thus measured, intolerance proved to be very widespread: two-thirds of those polled said that a communist should not be permitted to make a speech in their community and that any books he had written should be removed from the public library, while nine out of every ten called for firing a communist from a college teaching position. Three decades after its publication, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties is still an impressive document, but it is not above reproach. Over the years, Stouffer's many successors (e.g., Borgatta and Hulquist 1956-57; Davis 1975; Nunn, Crockett, and Williams 1978) have tried to remedy methological shortcomings in his analysis, but recently a more basic problem has come to the fore. In a series of publications, Sullivan and his associates (1979, 1982, 1985) have criticized Stouffer and those who followed his lead for purporting to study tolerance of nonconformity when Stouffer's conclusions bear more closely on tolerance of communists and other left-leaning groups.1 The problem, according to Sullivan et al. (1979: 784-85), is

Developmental psychology · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Academic Freedom and Politics · History · Medicine · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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