Bandy Heritage Center to host "Dalton's Red Menace: Don West and McCarthyism in Northwest Georgia"
September 25, 2017
On Tuesday, October 10, 2017, from 6:00pm to 7:30pm in Room 105 of the James E. Brown Center on the campus of Dalton State College, the Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia will host Dr. Seth Weitz as he presents “Dalton’s Red Menace: Don West and McCarthyism in Northwest Georgia.”
The fear of the “Red Menace” dominated American society and culture for decades, and though Joseph McCarthy and his brand of terror, dubbed McCarthyism, technically only lasted for four years on the national level, at the state level, crusades and witch hunts both preceded and followed the Wisconsin senator’s brief reign. In Northwest Georgia labor movements in the 1930s and 1940s attracted attention from the government, and in the 1950s, activist Don West, who had been a member of the American Communist Party, was attacked in Dalton for his political stance, bringing this part of the Cold War to an otherwise quiet section of the state. Dr. Weitz will examine McCarthyism in Georgia, and Northwest Georgia specifically, during the 1940s and 1950s to see how it related to other Southern states at the time, while focusing on the role Don West played in this saga. This program is free and open to the public.
Dr. Seth Weitz received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from Florida State University and is an Associate Professor of History at Dalton State College where he teaches courses on African-American history, the Civil Rights Movement, the New South, and the history of Georgia.