The postwar US red scare operated through character assassination and impoverishment rather than imprisonment.

Evidence

These two forms of hatred fused into an everescalating witch-hunt, which, although it did not lead to arrests, torture and death, did achieve character assassination, unemployment and impoverishment, and a poisoning of the atmosphere of political and social life. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1668

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the claim in the Frankfurter Schule literature that American cold-war anticommunism was a civil-society purge rather than a police terror.