You misstate, I believe, the direction of the 'anti-American effect..."
It was actually the acceptance of totalitarian communism by both the average person who had no sense of how dangerous communism was, and how close it came to dominating this country, and elected Democratic officials, who laughed it off, that represented anti-Americanism. McCarty was the Paul Revere of his day.
A better understanding of the numbers:
"The best and most generous estimate is that during the entire decade of the red scare, ten thousand Americans lost their jobs because of their past or present
affiliation with the Communist Party or one of its auxiliary organizations. Of those who lost their jobs, two thousand worked in the
government, and in perhaps forty cases McCarthy himself was directly or indirectly responsible for their being fired.
In only one case — that of Owen Lattimore — can anyone make the argument that McCarthy's allegations led to any actual legal proceedings, and there a judge eventually threw out most of the indictment. Paradoxically, the fact that
McCarthy never sent anyone to prison is also turned against him; opponents claimed that during his entire career, he never actually exposed a single spy or Communist — a claim that is manifestly untrue, as we will see.
In fact, the number of people who did spend time in prison remained small. A grand total of
108 Communist Party members were convicted under the antisubversion provisions of the Smith Act, which Congress passed in 1941 (long before McCarthy was a member) and applied as equally to Nazi and fascist organizations as it did to Communists. Another twenty Communist Party members were imprisoned under state and local laws. Fewer than a dozen Americans went to jail for espionage activities (one of them being Alger Hiss, who was convicted of perjury). Exactly two were sentenced to death for conspiracy to commit espionage: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg."
(emphasis mine)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/herman-mccarthy.html
To get a better picture of what we would have seen in the United States, had agents like Lattimore, White, and the Rosenbergs gotten their way, consider what the Russian Communists did to their own people:
"We need to contrast all this with the three and a half million people who, according to the KGB's own official numbers, were arrested and sent to the gulag during the six years of Stalin's Great Terror, from 1935 to 1941. None had the benefit of any genuine legal protection; Stalin's secret police seized, interrogated, and sentenced the lot. The KGB states that of that number, 681,692 were executed in 1937-1938 alone. Taken with the four or five million people who died in Stalin's Great Famine of 1932-1933, the total number of human beings executed, exiled, imprisoned, or starved to death in those years comes to ten to eleven million. These are official KGB numbers released at the end of the cold war.
They are almost certainly low."
Ibid.
And the hero who stood up against this 'red tide' is the one you choose to rail against. I know you'll reconsider in view of the actual history.
