26. Cold War Politics in the Truman Years, 1945

Quiz for Experiencing the American Promise: An Immigrant Scientist Encounters the Anti-Communist Crusade

Select the best answer for each question. Click the “submit” button for each question to turn in your work.

Question 26.6

1. What does Qian Xuesen’s 1935 decision to leave his native China to pursue graduate school in the United States suggest about the state of science and engineering in the United States in that period?

The United States was more welcoming to foreign engineering students than other nations.

The United States was weak in science and engineering, but MIT and Caltech were exceptions.

The United States was an international leader of scientific innovation in the 1930s.

The Great Depression had drastically cut budgets for engineering education in the United States.

Question 26.7

2. The United States government revoked Qian Xuesen’s security clearance in 1950 in response to

Qian’s marriage to a government official’s daughter.

China’s civil war between Mao Zedong and Jiang Jieshi.

the visit Qian took to China in the late 1940s.

the Communist takeover of the Chinese government.

Question 26.8

3. Although in the 1950s Caltech administrators faithfully defended Qian Xuesen’s integrity and loyalty to the United States, some of his colleagues avoided Qian because

the government threatened them with a loss of their own security clearances.

they feared that they, too, would be accused of being a Communist.

he had begun protesting against the United States government.

they, like the United States government, thought that Qian was a Communist.

Question 26.9

4. Why might the United States government have found it particularly dangerous for Qian Xuesen to be a Communist, relative to other suspected Communists living in the United States?

The government suspected that Qian’s Communist sympathies were more ardent and extremist than other Communists in the country.

Qian could speak multiple languages, which allowed him to easily communicate with Communists in other countries.

Most government officials had the racially prejudiced belief that Chinese people were inherently untrustworthy and predisposed to spy.

Qian’s security clearance gave him access to valuable United States military intelligence that he could potentially share with China.

Question 26.10

5. What is the historical significance of Qian Xuesen’s arrest, interrogation, and eventual deportation, due to the United States government’s suspicion that he was a Communist?

The rabid fear of communism caused the United States to lose a brilliant scientist, whose significant contributions to the field of rocketry aided the Chinese instead.

The Red scare of the Cold War intensified existing anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States because so many Chinese nationals were deported for being suspected Communists.

Thanks to Qian’s contributions, Caltech was on its way in the 1940s to becoming the preeminent American university, but after his deportation, its reputation flagged.