During the New Deal the
Roosevelt administration opened the door so that communists, socialists, social
democrats, progressives and liberals could work together in a broad Popular
Front of social reform. They did not always get along, but they did work
together for certain shared goals. Reformer and revolutionary cooperated in setting
up necessary immediate reforms. During World War II most groups would step back
from these programs in order to concentrate on winning the War. After the War
there was a concerted effort to curb any further reforms to Keynesian
Capitalism. Big financial institutions, industrial corporate executives,
Republicans, Southern Democrats, Old Guard Machine Democrats all said enough is
enough and progressive New Deal Democrats and their socialist allies of all
persuasions would have to be taught a lesson. At first Truman was neutral on
this debate, but soon he learned by targeting progressive New Dealers he could
gain popular and bi-partisan support for his foreign policies.
From the beginning of
the New Deal congressional right wing, fought the New Deal all the way. Using
red bating as their main avenue of attack. Yet the popularity of the Roosevelt squad,
the man himself and the try one thing if “that don’t work, try something else
approach” made the New Deal impervious to assaults from Republican, private
enterprise big business advocates, backward-looking rugged individualists. Yet
the New Deal remained popular with small rural communities and industrial
working class neighborhoods.
During the War, because
of the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States serious red bating
carried little weight among a large portion of the American Population. After
the War Southern Democrats, Republicans, Urban Machine Democrats would
cooperate in red bating New Deal progressives, socialists, communist and just
about anyone that would have supported Roosevelt if he was still alive.
In 1945 and early 1946
Truman seemed uninterested in this second red scare. There wasn’t much support
in the nation as a whole if polls mean anything. Both the fear of immigrant opinions
corrupting traditional American values with radical foreign ideas and New Deal
slipping into real socialism failed to gain broad popular support. The shift
from concern of a socialist economy replacing capitalism to a threat of an overseas
seditious conspiracy with its internal subversive supporters was a Truman conception.
One in which by his second administration Truman would lose control of this his
baby.
While the Soviet Union
was really undemocratic and intolerant of any dissent and clearly what was
happening in Eastern Europe was cruel and exceedingly tragic there was no
evidence that the Soviets were encouraging the large and popular Communist
Parties in France and Italy to seize power by undemocratic means. There was no indication
in early 1947 that the Soviets were either leading or supplying the Democratic
Army of Greece after the civil war broke out. There was no proof that the
Soviets were in control of the Communist movements in China or Indochina.
The Republican and
Southern Democratic dominated House Committee on UnAmerican Activities would
very soon change its focus to the threat of support of Soviet policies i.e. a
Communist or Communist supporter. Truman had already begun orchestrating the
fear of Soviet aggression, the spread in international communism outside of the
Soviet Union and within the US an internal threat to national security. These
threats would be presented to the American people as being the same threat. The
American people were soon infected with this fear. The Republican
anti-communism was modified accordingly to keep up and surpass Truman. If all
Americans were to stand united against this threat, then any further expansion
on the New Deal reform would need to take a back seat to national security,
according to Republicans.
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