I mean, there are people today--literally in the removed comments in this thread--saying that because the Russians did have spies in the U.S. during the Cold War, the hundreds upon hundreds of government officials, professors, entertainers, and activists who lost their jobs, went to prison or endured lengthy criminal justice proceedings, or even faced deportation for being former Communists, or refusing to sign a loyalty oath, or simply refusing to denounce friends is all completely justified. So it shouldn't surprise you that the ramifications of being targeted by McCarthyism (broadly defined) didn't stop when the Army-McCarthy hearings did.

There are some notable exceptions--the state of Hawai'i, anyone?--but most people found their original career paths gone forever or they could only return to something similar after years and years. For example, China and Asian foreign policy expert Owen Lattimore was so good at what he did, he was given professorships at multiple universities even though he never attended college. Accused of being the "top Soviet spy" either in the whole U.S. or just in the State Department (apparently McCarthy couldn't make up his mind), Lattimore lost his job. And it stayed lost as the U.S. faced down the troubles in Southeast Asia that the U.S. stirred up into the Vietnam War--it stayed so lost that he ended up in England.

The reasons for this, of course, vary from case to case and are sometimes had to reconstruct owing to the patchy access to sources/victims' frequent reluctance to record their own experiences. Still, we can suggest at least a few common themes.

Most basically, there is simply the "interrupted career" factor. This was certainly in play for one of the groups most vulnerable to enduring the so-called "second stage" of McCarthyism--economic sanctions like job loss--once they were victims of the first, identification as a Communist or sympathizer: junior professors. Early in their careers, the loss of institutional support coupled with their lack of previous work to show surely hindered their attempts at finding work in academia again. For No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Ellen Schrecker found one accused junior professor who managed to retain academic employment. One.

There were also emotional costs to the people persecuted and prosecuted. Some of this is visible directly or indirectly through memoirs and interviews. Susan Sperling argues that onetime-superstar anthropologist Ashley Montagu's later insistence that his "retirement" from academia was a personal choice reflected a gradual confinement of oppositions and dwindling of hope that anything better could result. Other times it's people like United Electrical Workers district representative Bill Heiston, who committed suicide:

Bill was a highly skilled electrician. He'd go to an interview with credentials that were impeccable in his field. He'd be hired. They'd tell him to report for work on Tuesday morning. Then they would call him Monday afternoon and tell him they were sorry. This happened enough times so there was no question that he was being blacklisted. He was single and didn't have a family to give him support. One day they found Bill. He couldn't take it any longer.

-Tom Quinn in Schultz and Schultz (eds.), "It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Oppression in America"

Another important factor was lack of major defenders on the institutional level. That is: organizations like the ACLU and unions, who "should" have stood up for the accused (especially as workers) were themselves deeply divided by anticommunist zealots versus every other perspective. Again, there are a few cases where the ACLU did step up and help someone out in court, but these seem to be the exception.

And then there was the difficulty that in the heated rhetoric and panic of the time, "Communist" and "pursuer of Communists, defender of the America" didn't just mean those specific things--they took on multiple connotations, for both parties. A sad example of the former is the so-called Lavender Scare, the simultaneous, larger, and related persecution of gay men and lesbians. The Lavender Scare has some of the same ideological/emotional underpinnings as the Red Scare in the sense that both revolved around fear of the unknown enemy who looks just like Us and so cannot be identified and excluded easily. But it had more explicit connections, too: a major accusation levelled at targeted lesbians and gay men was that their homosexuality made them susceptible to blackmail into being Communist spies. (Conveniently forgetting that if homosexuality weren't something to have to cover up for fear of being tagged as a Communist, they wouldn't be susceptible to blackmail over it...) So the ideas of unreliable, unpatriotic, and so forth traveled along with the accusation of "Communist" and lingered even when the formal label had faded into the background for many--not all--people.

And the stigma did linger. Another situation was the endurance of True Believers. Fired Temple University philosophy professor Barrows Durham got to feel this one. Even though the American Association of University Professors issued an official censure of Temple and extracted a promise that they would never fire professors for taking the Fifth Amendment again, Durham didn't get his job back, and he didn't get a monetary settlement for his grievances. In fact, he didn't teach again for fifteen years.

And so while McCarthy himself might not have come out of the Red Scare as one of the greatest men in American history, others involved in direct, on-the-ground persecution of individuals sure did. University of Nevada president Minard Stout had led a massive anticommunist campaign against the faculty and students of his school. In the shellshocked aftermath of the McCarthy years, he was indeed fired in 1957...

...upon which he spent several years as the head of R&D at a major corporation, was back in academic employment in administration by 1960, and eventually wound up serving a variety of key roles in the U.S. Department of Education. He maintained two things for the rest of his life: first, that his purge at the university gave him the reputation of a man able to "clean things up"; second, that getting fired from U Nevada by anti-McCarthy reactors was seen as a major bonus in hiring decisions by "important people all over the country."

Of course, consequences to individual people have to be set in context of societal, intellectual, and political consequences. After studying McCarthyism in academia, for example, Schrecker turned her attention to its blight on the labor movement and echoing problems with justice for American workers today; now she is one of the most vocal speakers against the threat to actual academic freedom today. But on a personal level or a structural one, although the scene isn't pitch black, it's still very, very dim.

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