224 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
Ten years after the end of World War II, Democrats
and Republicans remained convinced that Soviet
communism posed the greatest threat to national
security. The country’s growing defense budgets
bore out that political consensus. Domestically,
however, the influence of the American Communist
Party was negligible by the mid-1950s. Vigorous
prosecutions of the party under the Smith Act had
crushed its leadership, while purges of communists
from universities and the entertainment industry had
effectively silenced any communist voice in education
and popular culture.
The domestic fight against communism began
at the end of World War I, when a young J. Edgar
Hoover used the new Federal Bureau of Investigation
to monitor those whom he considered politically
dangerous or radical. But the prosecution of internal
communism was complicated when the United
States joined with the Soviet Union to defeat fascism
during World War II. This era of the “Popular Front”
gave rise to an attitude of tolerance toward the
American Communist Party, and a few civil servants
in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were
even convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Such
convictions prompted widespread suspicions of
an extended espionage network in America. These
suspicions also justified ongoing investigations
conducted by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC). Truman further heightened fears
of treason by requiring in 1947 that civil servants take
oaths of loyalty.
That fear of communism turned into outright
panic once Senators Joseph McCarthy and Pat
McCarran escalated accusations of domestic
subversion. While Republicans might have had
an upper hand in these attacks, anti-communism
was a thoroughly bipartisan issue. In the 1950s
Pennsylvania Democrat Francis Walter continued
the work of the HUAC. Walter had successfully
collaborated with McCarran to prevent current and
former communists from immigrating to the United
States. After both McCarthy and McCarran died in
1956, Walter worried that the country had begun
to accommodate itself to the Soviet Union, settling
for “peaceful coexistence” rather than defiant
THE VIGILANT FIGHT AGAINST COMMUNISM
Research Institute of America,
“How Communists Menace Vital
Materials,” 1956