By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
Fears of domestic communism affected America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There was a series of espionage cases in the late 1940s, which showed that spies may have accelerated the Soviet Union’s ability to create its own nuclear weapons, and these cases heightened fears of internal American communism.
Domestic Communism
The Truman government began to investigate the loyalty of federal employees, whose numbers had risen very sharply during the New Deal and the war, and to dismiss those of them it could show had previously been, or currently were, Communist Party members. Many businesses, including the Hollywood film industry, conducted anti-communist purges of their own.
The American decision to resist the communist North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 intensified these anti-communist fears inside America, and it gave a demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the opportunity to exploit public fears, some of which were irrational.
Dwight Eisenhower, a World War II hero, ran successfully for president in 1952, and arranged a cease-fire in Korea shortly after his inauguration early in 1953. Korea, along with Berlin, then remained a potential flash point throughout the following decades of the Cold War.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Fears of Espionage
The end of the fighting mitigated anti-communist fears at home to some extent, and Senator McCarthy’s rash attacks on alleged communists inside the U.S. Army itself discredited him. However, rapid changes in the world in the late 1940s contributed to the fear that communism and communist espionage had undermined American security.
The Soviet Union completed its own atom bomb in 1949, much sooner than the Americans had thought it was going to happen. That increased the fears that espionage had contributed to this rapid Soviet success.
A Spy Ring in Nuclear Research
American, British and Canadian security investigations discovered that a spy ring had been working at Los Alamos, inside the nuclear research project. Of course, this was at a time when the Soviet Union was one of America’s allies, and so the spies themselves could have done it in good conscience, believing that they were helping the wartime alliance.
Nevertheless, it was clearly a violation of national security, and two among the members of this spy ring, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were sentenced to death for treason. After their appeals had been exhausted, they were executed in 1953, amid demonstrations in support of the execution on behalf of passionate anti-communists, and against the executions, on the part of civil libertarians and sympathizers with the political left.
Chinese Revolution
Another dramatic event of 1949 was the Chinese revolution and the defeat of Chiang Kai Shek, America’s client, which again intensified the internal fears. The story went around that America had lost China—that somehow events in America had contributed to the Chinese revolution; this was actually a highly misleading idea.
China had been in a condition of near-revolution ever since 1910, and rival Chinese armies—one under the leadership of Chiang Kai Shek, and one under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the communist leader—had been fighting each other in the 1920s. They had postponed their rivalry to attempt to repel the Japanese invader in the 1930s and 1940s, but resumed their bitter civil war as soon as the Japanese had been expelled.
America was providing aid to Chiang Kai Shek on a massive scale, but corruption among his supporters, and the mass defection of Chinese soldiers to Mao’s army, ensured, eventually, that Chiang would be defeated.
Advance of Communism
Living in 1949, an American anti-communist could get the impression that the great red stain of communism was very rapidly spreading across the world. In 1917, no country was communist and suddenly the Great Russian Empire became communist. Then, in the mid-1940s, all of Eastern Europe was added to the communist bloc. Now, China was going to be added. The fear was the remorseless advance of communism—that it was unstoppable, and perhaps disloyal Americans were actually contributing to that process.
Anti-communists in Congress, though, particularly on the Republican side, denounced President Truman for the ‘loss of China’, that he had done too little to prevent this thing from happening.
Meanwhile, the Truman administration was already investigating its own employees. It had begun to institute background checks on federal employees in 1947, searching for possible sources of communist infiltration.
American Communism
The thing to remember is that during the Great Depression, American communism had briefly been quite popular, particularly among intellectuals, the types of people who might very well go on to get important jobs in the American bureaucracy.
American capitalism did seem to have failed disastrously in the Wall Street crash, and in the spiraling down of the Great Depression, so it was reasonable to join the communists, or to sympathize with their program of having a rationally planned economy—of eliminating the business cycle, of eliminating wasteful competition and all the rest of it.
However, one had to be incredibly politically cynical to be a communist through the 1930s and into the 1940s, because what was required was repeated lurching changes of direction in one’s own political alliances. Consequently, American Communist Party membership, by the late 1940s was already very small. Still, it is true that people had sometimes either belonged to the party or belonged to sympathizing organizations in the 1930s.
Common Questions about Anti-communist Fears in America
China had been in a condition of near-revolution ever since 1910, and rival Chinese armies—one under the leadership of Chiang Kai Shek, and one under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the Communist leader—had been fighting each other in the 1920s.
America was providing aid to Chiang Kai Shek on a massive scale, but corruption among his supporters, and the mass defection of Chinese soldiers to Mao’s army, ensured, eventually, that Chiang would be defeated.
During the Great Depression, American communism had briefly been quite popular.
