page_title: Learned Hand
section_title: McCarthyism
hierarchical_section_title: Learned Hand / Postwar years / McCarthyism
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Joseph Raymond McCarthy. English: Joseph Raymond McCarthy. Español: Joseph Raymond McCarthy. Français&#160;: Joseph Raymond McCarthy.
context_page_description: Billings Learned Hand was an American judge and judicial philosopher. He served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Hand has been quoted more often by legal scholars and by the Supreme Court of the United States than any other lower-court judge.
  Born and raised in Albany, New York, Hand majored in philosophy at Harvard College and graduated with honors from Harvard Law School. After a short career as a lawyer in Albany and New York City, he was appointed at the age of 37 as a Federal District Judge in Manhattan in 1909. The profession suited his detached and open-minded temperament, and his decisions soon won him a reputation for craftsmanship and authority. Between 1909 and 1914, under the influence of Herbert Croly's social theories, Hand supported New Nationalism. He ran unsuccessfully as the Progressive Party's candidate for Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals in 1913, but withdrew from active politics shortly afterwards.
context_section_description: In the postwar period, Hand shared the dismay of his compatriots about Stalinism and the onset of the Cold War. At the same time, he was sensitive to the domestic problems created by what he saw as a hysterical fear of international Communism. Already in 1947, he noted that "the frantic witch hunters are given free rein to set up a sort of Inquisition, detecting heresy wherever non-conformity appears". Hand was distressed by the crusade against domestic subversion that became part of American public life after the war. He particularly despised the anti-Communist campaign of Senator Joseph McCarthy that began in 1950 and which became known as McCarthyism. Though Hand expressed his horror of McCarthyism privately, he hesitated to do so publicly because cases arising from it were likely to come before his court.
  During this period, Hand took part in three notable cases that posed a particular challenge to his impartiality on Cold War issues: United States v. Coplon, United States v. Dennis, and United States v. Remington.
caption: Senator Joseph McCarthy
exif: {}