As I recall, from another NPR episode, most just couldn't find work. Some ran to Mexio, and still couldn't find work. (Their work was pretty bad)
They later made a living out of being on the black-list. Last year (or the year before), a very old communist held a one-man protest at some awards ceremony and the leftists made a big deal about it. Sheesh. I've seen 4 year olds do better.
/john
I don't remember reading that anyone was imprisoned, though some certainly should have been. Alger Hiss for example, who was a fairly top level official at the State dept, IIRC, and Whittaker Chambers who outed him was given a pretty hard time. (BTW, if anyone here is looking for a great read, take a look at Chambers' book Witness---some of the best writing I've read.)
Richard Nixon took Chambers' side and was vilified by the left forevermore. It took over 20 years to bring Nixon down, but the left finally got him in '74. He was an enemy of the left from the time of the Hiss-Chambers affair in the early 50s.
Some of the Hollywood types who were called by McCarthy to testify were blacklisted in Hollywood, and didn't work for a number of years, like Dalton Trumbo, though I think he and other writers wrote under pseudonyms.
McCarthy might have been an unsavory and unpopular guy personally, but he was on target with this. I was amazed when I started to read about all this, after all the years of propaganda that I had ingested, and then I began to see what the real story was.