Red Scare Or Red Menace?

As one of a handful of American scholars allowed to review documents in newly opened Soviet archives, John Haynes has used fresh evidence to shed new light on the United States' confrontation with communism at home. In a succinct survey, Haynes traces the buildup of the American Communist party (CPUSA) in the twenties and thirties, focuses on the heyday of popular anticommunism from 1945 to 1960, and follows the relative decline of anticommunism as a political issue in the sixties and seventies. Along the way he describes the chief episodes, figures, and institutions of cold war anticommunism, showing how earlier campaigns against domestic fascists and right-wingers provided most all of anti-communism's tactics and weapons. And he dissects the various anticommunist constituencies, analyzing their origins, motives, and activities. Haynes draws on new and incontestable evidence that the Soviet Union heavily subsidized the CPUSA from its earliest days; maintained an underground organization in Washington in the 1930s that reported to the CPUSA and in turn to Moscow on U.S. government activities; and placed CPUSA members in the wartime OSS and OWI, the government's major intelligence and propaganda agencies. He also confirms much of Elizabeth Bentley's 1940s accusations of Communist infiltrations. American Ways Series.

As one of the handful of American scholars allowed to review documents in newly opened Soviet archives, Haynes has used fresh evidence to shed new light on the United States' confrontation with communism at home. Haynes traces the build-up of the American Communist Party in the '20s and '30s to the decline of anticommunism as a political issue in the '60s and '70s.

A reappraisal of American communism and anticommunism in the cold war era, focusing on episodes, personalities, and institutions, and based upon fresh evidence that overturns a great deal of received wisdom. Haynes argues convincingly that after the Second World War the American Communist Party was indeed a serious danger to the American body politic....He has begun the necessary reexamination of a squalid era. --Ronald Radosh, Times Literary Supplement. American Ways Series.

Publishers Weekly

According to Haynes, manuscript historian at the Library of Congress, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA)-whose membership purportedly never exceeded 70,000-was a definite threat to American security. Newly opened Russian archives reveal, for instance, that the CPUSA worked directly with Soviet intelligence officer Vasily Zubilin, who supervised the theft of atomic bomb secrets, and that the CPUSA, which was financed by Moscow, also provided recruits for Soviet intelligence agencies engaged in espionage against the U.S. Outlining reasons for the party's decline after its peak in the 1940s, Haynes cites the failure of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party presidential campaign in 1948, Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and the massive FBI penetration of the CPUSA. Controversially, Haynes concludes that, despite its excesses during the McCarthy era, the anticommunism of the '40s and '50s was not entirely irrational, given the links between the CPUSA and Soviet espionage. (Feb.)

John E. Haynes, an American historian now at the Library of Congress, has also written Dubious Alliance and has co-edited The Secret World of American Communism.