Eleanor Roosevelt and other Cold War liberals saw themselves as both anti-McCarthyites and still devoutly anticommunist. As Carol Polsgrove writes, they hated McCarthy because he “was giving anti-communism a bad name.”46 So, there was no contradiction in their minds between purging communists from their organizations and opposing what they viewed as extremist practices initiated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and continued by the House Un-American Activities Committee after his censure by the Senate in 1954.
