Why was it so different being a communist in the U.S. in the 1930s versus in the 1940s?
One of the main arguments in my book is that the Red Scare is at the heart largely a culture war. It’s one that pits the progressive New Deal culture of the 1930s against a revanchist, certainly anti-New Deal, but also anti-progressive conservatism. In the 1930s, there was not just the New Deal, and not just the tumult of the Great Depression, but the emergence of a culture in America that was very different from what had come before, certainly what had existed in the 1920s. It was cosmopolitan, pluralistic, very, very much in favor of an expansive government—but also in favor of things like women’s rights and civil rights and labor rights. It was a very much a different conception of America.
Among the people who shaped that culture, you had a wide variety of groups. They didn’t necessarily agree on a lot. But there was a sense that we’re in this together, and that there was a common cause. In the 1930s, fascism was growing as a threat in Germany and in Spain. It gave everyone a sense of what the stakes were.
Fast forward ten years or so. It’s the end of World War II, and we immediately find ourselves as a country in the grips of the Cold War. It’s going to be a war fought through propaganda, through espionage, subversion and all these things that suddenly gave fuel to people who said those folks from the 1930s are suspect because they have the taint of communism. What was acceptable in the past is no longer acceptable. We cannot run the risk of allowing foreign ideologies, pretty much anything left of center, to have anything to do with American society. If you were a communist, you were in trouble.