Comment by LAC-Tech
2 hours ago
I feel like this article is leaving some important bits out for the sake of a narrative.
From Wikipedia
By the early 1940s, U.S. Army Intelligence was already aware of allegations that Qian was a communist
This predates the red scare - at the time the US was in bed with "Uncle Joe" Stalin.
While at Caltech, Qian had secretly attended meetings with J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank Oppenheimer, Jack Parsons, and Frank Malina that were organized by the Russian-born Jewish chemist Sidney Weinbaum and called Professional Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party.[43] Weinbaum's trial commenced on August 30 and both Frank Oppenheimer and Parsons testified against him.[44] Weinbaum was convicted of perjury and sentenced to four years.[45] Qian was taken into custody on September 6, 1950, for questioning [7] and for two weeks was detained at Terminal Island, a low-security United States federal prison near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. According to Theodore von Kármán's autobiography, when Qian refused to testify against his old friend Sidney Weinbaum, the FBI decided to launch an investigation on Qian.[46]
This seems incredibly pertinent to the story as well.
Every other intellectual and artist was a communist or socialist back then, but not in any way that seriously threatened the state. They all happily worked on the bomb, after all.
I don't claim to be an expert on this case.
But I can tell when things are being omitted or glossed over.
It does not detail those facts. I gloss over them in my reading of the article because I think the topic is been well covered elsewhere. For example, the Oppenheimer movie did a fair job of depicting the communist party activities among intellectuals in the late 1930s.
The fact that those activities led to a thing called McCarthism in the early 1950s is pretty well documented.
Imprisoning Qian for 5 years for a meeting in the late 1930s after his contributions to the war effort was very Red Scare consistent.