Section II: The Early American War on Communism

The First Red Scare (1917–1920)

The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in November 1917 sent shockwaves through the American political establishment. The new Soviet government explicitly called for workers' revolution worldwide, and a wave of labor unrest — fueled by postwar economic dislocation, massive immigration, and genuine working-class grievances — convinced many Americans that revolution was not merely a foreign phenomenon.

The year 1919 was particularly alarming. In February, a general strike paralyzed Seattle. In September, the Boston Police Department went on strike, leaving the city without law enforcement for days (Governor Calvin Coolidge's refusal to negotiate made him a national hero). A wave of mail bombs targeting prominent officials and businessmen — including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer — appeared to confirm fears of a coordinated revolutionary conspiracy.

Palmer's response was the Palmer Raids: mass arrests of suspected radicals conducted in November 1919 and January 1920. Approximately 10,000 people were arrested, often without warrants, in coordinated nationwide sweeps targeting the Communist Party USA, the Communist Labor Party, and labor organizers. A young J. Edgar Hoover, then 24 years old and head of the Justice Department's Radical Division (later renamed the General Intelligence Division), organized the raids and compiled extensive dossiers on radical organizations.

The raids resulted in the deportation of approximately 556 people, including the prominent anarchist Emma Goldman. Civil libertarians — including future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis — condemned the raids as unconstitutional. The Red Scare subsided by 1920 as the feared revolution failed to materialize, but the institutional machinery of federal countersubversion had been established and would be activated again within a generation.

Legislative Weapons Against Subversion

Congress moved quickly to provide legal tools for prosecuting Communist activity. The Espionage Act of 1917 criminalized interference with military operations and draft registration. The Sedition Act of 1918 extended these prohibitions to virtually any speech critical of the government, the flag, or the war effort — provisions so broad that the postmaster general could bar publications from the mail system. Both laws were used against socialist newspapers and anti-war activists, with Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs sentenced to ten years in prison for an anti-war speech.

The most significant legislative weapon against Communism was the Smith Act (formally the Alien Registration Act of 1940), which made it a federal crime to 'knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence.' It also criminalized membership in any organization advocating such overthrow. Codified as 18 U.S.C. § 2385, the Smith Act would become the primary legal instrument for prosecuting Communist Party leadership during the Second Red Scare.

The Second Red Scare and McCarthyism (1947–1957)

The Allied victory in World War II left the United States and the Soviet Union as the world's two superpowers — and rapidly transformed them from wartime allies into Cold War adversaries. The Soviet Union's acquisition of nuclear weapons (1949), the Communist victory in China (1949), and the North Korean invasion of South Korea (1950) created an atmosphere of genuine alarm about Communist infiltration of American government and institutions.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), established in 1938 as a special committee and made permanent in 1945, became the primary investigative body targeting Communist influence. HUAC's 1947 investigation into the Hollywood film industry produced the most famous confrontation of the era: the 'Hollywood Ten,' a group of screenwriters and directors who refused to cooperate with the committee, invoking First Amendment protections, and were subsequently blacklisted and imprisoned for contempt of Congress. The Hollywood blacklist eventually affected hundreds of entertainment industry workers.

The Alger Hiss case (1948–1950) proved the most significant early investigation. Hiss, a senior State Department official who had attended the Yalta Conference, was accused by former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers of being a Communist agent. Hiss denied the charges; HUAC investigator Richard Nixon pressed the case vigorously. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 and sentenced to five years in federal prison. The case demonstrated that Soviet espionage had penetrated the highest levels of American government.

The case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg provided the era's most dramatic prosecution. Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer and Communist Party member, ran a spy ring that passed critical information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. He and his wife Ethel were convicted of espionage and executed on June 19, 1953 — the only American civilians executed for espionage during the Cold War. Soviet archives opened after 1991 confirmed Julius's guilt beyond reasonable doubt, while revealing that the evidence against Ethel was thinner.

Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Era of Anti-Communist Investigation

On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) delivered a Lincoln Day speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming to hold in his hand a list of Communists employed by the State Department. The number varied in subsequent accounts — 205, then 57, then 81 — but the allegation ignited a political firestorm. McCarthy became the era's most prominent face of anti-Communist investigation, even though most of his specific allegations were exaggerated or fabricated.

McCarthy's methods — reckless accusation, guilt by association, and the destruction of reputations without due process — produced genuine injustice and gave rise to the term 'McCarthyism' as a synonym for baseless accusation. His downfall came during the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954, when he attacked the U.S. Army itself over alleged Communist influence. Army counsel Joseph Welch's devastating rejoinder — 'Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?' — captured the moment when McCarthy's credibility collapsed. The Senate voted to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954, by a vote of 67–22. He died in 1957.

McCarthy's excesses obscured the reality that genuine Communist espionage and infiltration had occurred — a fact confirmed by the Venona project, a classified NSA operation that decrypted thousands of Soviet intelligence cables and identified hundreds of Soviet agents operating in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. The existence of Venona was not publicly disclosed until 1995.

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

J. Edgar Hoover served as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until his death in 1972 — 48 years as America's chief domestic intelligence officer. Hoover made anti-Communism the organizing mission of the FBI, building extensive files on Communist Party members, sympathizers, and suspected fellow travelers. His methods ranged from lawful surveillance to tactics that violated constitutional rights.

COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), launched in 1956, was the FBI's classified effort to infiltrate, disrupt, and discredit domestic political organizations deemed subversive. Originally targeting the Communist Party USA, COINTELPRO expanded to target the Socialist Workers Party, Black nationalist organizations, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement, and — controversially — civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tactics included planting informants, forging documents to sow discord, anonymous tip-offs to employers and landlords, and wiretapping without court authorization. COINTELPRO was exposed by the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI in 1971 and subsequently investigated by the Senate Church Committee (1975–1976).

Containment: The Broader Strategy

The United States did not merely prosecute individual Communists — it built a comprehensive global strategy to contain Communist expansion. State Department official George Kennan articulated the intellectual foundation in his 'Long Telegram' (1946) and the anonymous 'X Article' (1947): the Soviet Union was an expansionist power driven by a combination of Marxist ideology and Russian imperial ambition that could be managed but not negotiated with. The appropriate response was 'firm and vigilant containment' at every point where Soviet power sought to expand.

The Truman Doctrine (1947) committed the United States to supporting free peoples resisting Communist subversion or outside pressure — initially in Greece and Turkey, but with implications extending to any country threatened by Communist takeover. The National Security Act (1947) reorganized the American national security apparatus, creating the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the modern Department of Defense. The Marshall Plan (1948) provided $12 billion (approximately $130 billion in 2024 dollars) to rebuild Western European economies, explicitly to counter the appeal of Communist parties in war-devastated countries.

The Korean War (1950–1953) was the first direct military confrontation with Communist forces, as American and United Nations troops fought to prevent Communist North Korea (backed by China and the Soviet Union) from absorbing the non-Communist South. The conflict ended in a stalemate at the 38th parallel that persists to this day. The Vietnam War (1955–1975), fought on the theory that a Communist victory in South Vietnam would trigger a 'domino effect' throughout Southeast Asia, ultimately ended in American withdrawal and Communist reunification of Vietnam — though the predicted domino effect did not materialize in the catastrophic form predicted.