In Red Scare or Red Menace? : American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era, John Earl Haynes identifies four gaps in the historiography of American anticommunism. First, a downplaying of connections between the American Communist Party and Soviet spies; second, historians do not link postwar anticommunism with antifascism during World War II; third, they do not fully characterize the variety of anticommunism in the United States; and, finally, they portray anticommunism as irrational (pg. vii). Haynes makes use of documents that were recently available in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union to prove his first point.
In linking the American Communist Party with Soviet spies, Haynes writes, “In recent decades many historians have suggested that while the Soviet intelligence services recruited some American Communists for espionage, this did not directly involve the American Communist party…Since the collapse of Soviet communism, however, documents found in Soviet archives as well as the Verona intercepts confirm the CPUSA’s direct involvement in Soviet espionage” (pg. 61). According to Haynes, “The passage of time…has verified [Elizabeth] Bentley’s [HUAC] testimony. World War II NKVD messages decoded by the U.S. government’s secret Verona project but not released until 1995 confirmed that most of those named as Soviet spies by Bentley were just what she said” (pg. 78). Furthermore, “In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, documents found in Russian archives confirmed [Whittaker] Chambers’s testimony about the existence of an American Communist party underground operating in Washington in the 1930s and early 1940s and of J. Peters’s role as its head” (pg. 86-87).
Discussing the role of anti-fascism with anticommunism, Haynes writes, “All the virtues and vices that would later mark post-World War II congressional investigations of communism were first played out by [New York Representative Samuel] Disckstein’s investigations of domestic fascism” (pg. 64). Haynes even links this back to the Red Scare of the 1920s, writing, “The heated atmosphere of the ‘Red Scare,’ as it was later called, provoked both federal and local agencies to disregard normal legal restraints on official power” (pg. 9). By the 1930s, however, communism became more acceptable to Americans, especially after Moscow’s call for a Popular Front led American communists to seek “common ground with liberals by supporting President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms at home and a foreign policy that opposed fascist aggression abroad” (pg. 12). This antifascism later informed anticommunist rhetoric. Haynes writes, “Much of the popular image of American communism that appeared after 1945 was based on attitudes developed in the 1930s and early 1940s toward fascism. In particular, the image of the American Communist party as a fifth column for the Soviet Union drew directly on late 1930s images of Nazi fifth-column activity” (pg. 19). Intellectuals attempted to link communism with fascism, but had little success until the Nazi-Soviet pact, at which point, “Because of the large reservoir of anti-Communist sentiment in the American population, the public easily accepted the Red fascism analysis and assimilated Communists into their fears about an American Nazi/Fascist fifth column” (pg. 35).
Haynes uses the different religious reactions to communism to describe the variety in anticommunist thought. Discussing about the Protestant evangelical Christian denominations, Haynes writes, "Their religious and their patriotic beliefs blended: a threat to one was perceived as a threat to the other. The cold war division of the world between the Western alliance led by the United States and the Communist bloc under the suzerainty of the Soviet Union; the irredeemably hostile nature of the Communist threat to the values held by evangelical Christians; and the apocalyptic nature of the contest, with its menace of nuclear catastrophe, resonated to evangelicals steeped in the Christian millenarian tradation" (pg. 90). Likewise, Catholics viewed the Soviet threat as one of secularism versus religion, a dichotomy beginning in the Spanish Civil War when the Catholic Church supported Franco’s fascists over the Republican forces. Socialists in the labor movement likewise worked to counter communist involvement in labor organization. Haynes describes Mensheviks, who opposed Lenin’s Bolsheviks, as providing “American Socialists with information about the Soviet suppression of dissent, the subordination of labor unions to the Communist party, and the replacement of the rule of law by the Communist party’s administrative fiat” (pg. 100).
In describing the onset of the Cold War and anticommunist activities, Haynes argues, “The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were about more than the immediate problems in Greece and Turkey or Europe’s economic crisis; they were a declaration of hostilities in the cold war and committed the United States to the containment of Communist expansion around the globe” (pg. 39). Haynes continues, “As cold war tensions sharpened, revelations of Soviet espionage linked to American Communists renewed the image of the American Communist movement as a treasonous fifth-column peril,” leading to investigations in which the government used tactics to procure information that would not hold up in court (pg. 50). Haynes writes, “This trade-off between the need quickly to stem the loss of sensitive information and the much slower pace required to gather evidence that could be used in a criminal proceeding plagued espionage cases throughout the cold war” (pg. 51). Similarly, much of political anticommunism served to advance political agendas and careers, as in the case of Richard Nixon and his work with HUAC. ( )