ANTICOMMUNISM

Domestic anticommunism—fear of "red" subversion—had once reflected the apprehensions of economic and political elites of an insurrection from below, but in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and between the two world wars the red menace was redefined. The threat now seemed to lie less in class revolt than in conspiracy, directed from Moscow and using infiltration and ideological seduction. This image of an invisible red menace underlined the need for systems of surveillance, whether by government agencies or by patriotic groups. With the communist movement apparently controlled by a hostile power, the issue increasingly became one of national security, and hence of compelling interest to politicians and bureaucrats. From the 1930s, party competition became a primary engine of anticommunist politics, but an array of interest groups—the American Legion, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the American Federation of Labor, among others—also urged action against the dangers of domestic communism.

During the Depression the Soviet experiment won some sympathetic interest among U. S. intellectuals, and the American Communist Party itself enjoyed a new vitality. At the same time the New Deal's expansion of government and its closeness to the labor movement evoked right-wing accusations that it was subject to communist influence. The Republican platform in the 1936 election claimed that American liberties were for the first time "threatened by government itself." Labor activists and political dissidents had long been denounced for their alleged communist proclivities, but now the federal government itself was being targeted. Such charges had little effect in that election, which Franklin Roosevelt resoundingly won, but the course of events soon enhanced their plausibility. U. S. communists were associating themselves with the Democratic Party and its allies, and popular front formations (in which liberals, radicals, and communists made common cause) appeared in some states and among industrial union, farmerlabor, and welfare groups. By 1938 a conservative reaction was underway against the New Deal, whose popular front associations rendered it vulnerable to red-baiting tactics. What is sometimes known as "the little red scare" focused largely on these popular front alignments, and was promoted by conservative Republicans and Democrats and right-wing patriotic and fringe groups. The scare was aided in 1939 by the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the outbreak of war in Europe, when U. S. communists suddenly seemed to be the accessories of Nazi aggression. While the pact devastated the popular front formations, it left U. S. communists isolated and encouraged the development of a liberal (as well as conservative) anticommunism. The Roosevelt administration itself began to act against domestic communists (Communist Party leader Earl Browder was arrested on a passport charge) and liberal leaders of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began exploring ways of easing communists out of CIO positions. As it turned out, the gathering anticommunist momentum was stalled by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941; when the United States joined the war in December it found itself an ally of the Soviet Union, and U. S. communists enthusiastically joined the war effort. But the varieties of anticommunism— corporate, patriotic, liberal, labor, Catholic, and others—did not disappear, and anticommunist politics were to emerge more strongly than ever with the coming of the Cold War.

ANTICOMMUNISM

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