n radicals. Hysteria was whipped-up for an entire year against left wing agitation and labor unrest. Many striking workers were deported.
The American Legion, an organization of veterans, was founded in 1919 and adopted a very strong anti-communist posture. It played an important role during three decades of the twentieth century in forging the emergence of an informal anti-communist network. It included conservative members of the American Federation of Labor. The American Legion and conservative politicians alleged that Roosevelts New Deal was infiltrated by communists and were using Federal Agencies to advance Stalins objectives. The Legion called on Congress to hold hearings on the allegations. There were a few, but they did not make a significant impact.
At the end of the 1930s, a new Alliance against the New Deal was forged between conservative Southern Democrats and Conservative Republicans. It led to the establishment in Congress of the House Un-American Committee (HUAC). The first HUAC Chair was a xenophobic Texas Democrat, Martin Dies. Hearings were held and the focus was on labor unions and New Deal Agencies. Testimonies included ex-communists, American Legion officials, representatives of other right-wing organizations and CIOs labor opponents. The Committee pursued the line that communists had infiltrated the government. Illegal red squads raided local Communist Party offices in Philadelphia and Washington DC and were able to obtain membership lists that were used to embarrass the Roosevelt Administration as numerous names included Federal employees. In 1939, the Hatch Act barred communists, Nazis and others from government employment. Then, in 1940, the Voorhist Act required groups with foreign affiliations to register with government. It was hoped that the American Communist Party would be forced to sever its ties with Moscow. In the said year, the Smith Act made it illegal to teach or advocate the overthrow of government or to join any organization that did.
The focus of the domestic anti-communist campaigns by the anti-communist network was centered around the American Communist Party (CP). As such, when Stalin signed a pact with the Nazis in 1939 and the Communist Party (CP) advocated the intensification of class warfare and was critical of the American government, it alienated its progressive members, sympathizers and allies. The Roosevelt Administration perceived the Communist Party (CP) as a threat to national security. Its leader, Earl Browder was jailed for passport violation and others of foreign birth were deported. FBIs J. Edgar Hoover was authorized to put the Communist Party (CP) under surveillance.
The 1940s saw a qualitative growth in the anti-communist network and the rise of professional anti-communists who sold their services to the HUAC and various groups within the network. Professionals included Benjamin Mandel who was a CP activist in the 1920s, and left in the 1930s to become in the 1940s Staff Research Director of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), and also Father John Cronin, a leading Catholic anti-communist who wrote a pamphlet for the Chamber of Commerce and was the liaison between the FBI and HUAC member, Richard Nixon.
POST WORLD WAR II
It was in that background that McCarthyism emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s. The anti-communist network intensified their national crusade against domestic communism using tactics that were very similar to those of the communists in the then USSR. A number of factors fuelled the Red Scare in America after the war. The United Front between USSR, USA and UK against Hitler disintegrated after the war. The Truman Administration was convinced that the USSR was committed to global expansion and domination, and that only the USA in the free world was capable of standing up to such a threat. Republican politicians accused Roosevelt of giving Poland to Stalin at Yalta in 1945 and that China was betrayed to Maos Communist Party. The establishment of communist dictatorships in Eastern and Central Europe under Russian tutelage fed America