When the Bolsheviks seized power during the Russian revolution in 1917, they suddenly found themselves in charge of a backwards country mired in the bloody First World War. Motivated by an ideology that was meant to implement a worker's paradise at the cost of individual freedoms, Lenin and his men instituted Communism in what became the Soviet Union, and pressed for worldwide expansion. Communist parties spread throughout the world, following Moscow's dictating lines and seeking to undermine their own societies for the benefit of a foreign power.
In the United States, the Communist Party of the United States of America was organized to support workers' right in the industrial struggles of the 1910s and 1920s, but in fact acted as a front for Stalin and the Russian Communist Party. Communism became the enemy of the American government, with a long pause during the Second World War. Government investigations by the FBI and McCarthy attempted to unearth supporters and spies of the Soviet Union, while loyalty oaths sought to assure the public that its civil servants were true Americans, despite constitutional provisions of the First Amendment that allowed freedom of speech and assembly.
Over two specific periods, in 1919 and in the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s, the Red Scares saw Communists behind every bush, ready to overthrow the United States and turn it into a vassal of the Soviet Union. In A Time of Fear, Marrin describes the drama and the history of the Red Scares, demonstrating that Communists in the United States were never as prevalent as thought, nor as dangerous to the constitutional order as the methods used to root them out. Fans of history will appreciate learning more about this little known period, and will be able to draw parallels to our current terrorism and white supremacist environments.
