t 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 Americans fears and made the attacks on domestic communists, particularly the American CP, justified. Winston Churchills memorable "iron curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, in the presence of Truman, clearly underlined that the Cold War was in full swing. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 deepened the scare. J Edgar Hoovers 1947 testimony before the HUAC contributed to the vision of many about communist threats as he demonized the USSR and shaped the Red menace and scare. In his words: "Every American communist was, and is, potentially and espionage agent of the USSR."
President Trumans policymakers did perceive the USSR and communism as a threat to America and the free world. However, Americans had just come out of a depression and a war. How does the President convince the American people to rearm and to allocate resources to fight communism abroad? Besides, his Republican competitors won the Congressional elections of 1946 and accused him of being soft on the communists. The President and his administration deliberately fueled the scare in pursuit of their foreign policy objectives by magnifying the threat of communism at home and abroad. The FBI under Hoover, the anti-communist network and ambitious Republican politicians like Mundt, Parnell, Nixon and others, spearheaded by McCarthy, took full advantage of the conjuncture, and used the scare to let loose seasons of repression and persecution of communists and non-communists alike.
The involvement of the Federal Government, particularly the Executive Branch helped transform the communist threat into a national obsession. Washington defined the elimination of communist influence as a top priority. In the 1940s and 1950s, every agency joined the anti-communist crusade, including the FBI, the State Department, the Post Office Department and the INS. Congress, Federal Bureaucrats and judges debated and implemented policies to deal with domestic communism. In the opinion of Ellen Schrecker: "although the phenomenon got its name from a member of the Senate (McCarthy