Listening to the incendiary rhetoric emanating from Trump and MAGA world, one would think the United States of today, decades after the collapse of the communist bloc, was enmeshed in an existential struggle against communism. Even before his election win in 2024, Trump claimed his opponents’ economic policies were at the extremes of leftism. Kamala Harris, he said, had gone “full communist.” With Trump setting the tone — and now ensconced in the White House — his minions have amplified that rhetoric as a way of justifying their repressive onslaught. For example, Homeland Security Director, and anti-immigrant stormtrooper, Kristi Noem told the press in July that liberals “are actually turning out to be a bunch of communists and Marxists.” In like fashion, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller — speaking in Washington’s Union Station after the military was dispatched to that city, proclaimed, “We’re not going to let the communists destroy a great American city.” The tenor and tone of all this show no signs of abating, as the fascistic moves and raw assertion of power continues.
That the trope of anti-communism is being invoked and retains such power, is in no small measure a testament to the legacy of the anti-communist initiatives of the 20th century. This writer’s forthcoming book, Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism, takes a deeper dive into that history. Given the moment we find ourselves in, it is worth exploring some.
Beginnings
In 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. What followed was a wave of repression in which his assassin, an erstwhile anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, was tried and executed, all within two months of the shooting. In the aftermath, New York State passed a law proscribing what it called “criminal anarchy,” making it a felony to advocate — not plan for, let alone move to carry out — revolution. The law would serve as a major weapon against organized leftists, specifically communists, who emerged in the early years of the 20th century.
Fast-forward 18 years, and an anarchist bombing at the home of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer triggered the Palmer Raids, a key chapter of what would come to be called the First Red Scare — a government roundup of thousands of anarchists and communists, hundreds of whom would be deported. Arrested in this period and prosecuted under the criminal anarchy law was the then-communist Benjamin Gitlow, convicted and imprisoned for publishing a document called The Left-Wing Manifesto. The conviction, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, was upheld. As the court wrote in its opinion, “It cannot be said that the State is acting arbitrarily or unreasonably when, in the exercise of its judgment as to the measures necessary to protect the public peace and safety, it seeks to extinguish the spark without waiting until it has enkindled the flame or blazed into the conflagration.” This principle of anti-advocacy — a fundamental negation of the First Amendment — would remain the law of the land for decades. It would also be a major instrument leveled against domestic communists.
This period also saw the rise of a young up-and-comer in the U.S. Justice Department: J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, who was modernizing the Bureau of Investigation (later the Federal Bureau of Investigation), created a filing system of anarchists and communists that would be a cornerstone of the FBI’s work going forward. The bureau also deployed government informants who gathered intelligence, facilitated raids, and spread insidious rumors about the loyalty of dedicated comrades. It was a methodological template that would come to serve the FBI well.
While the fallout from the Palmer Raids subsided by the mid-1920s, the communists, who would cohere into the Communist Party USA (CPUSA or CP), would become the preeminent target of the FBI and other anti-communist forces. In doing so, it confronted the repressive bite of not only the bureau, but also the anti-syndicalism and criminal anarchy laws that had been passed in nearly every state in the U.S. — to say nothing of the routine harassment by right-wing forces and local police.
Depression and World War
Such was the situation as the country entered the Great Depression. It was during this time that rank-and-file communists and their supporters fought for unions, the unemployed, and opposed lynchings and the larger Jim Crow system. In doing so, they confronted unceasing pushback — firings, violent attacks on their meetings, arrests on the picket lines, beatings by police, and even killings. All of this was facilitated by a media sounding a hyperbolic alarm against a communist menace.
That alarm would grow shriller as the country approached World War II. The communists, whose initial anti-war position was at cross purposes with the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were targeted by early predecessors of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. They also saw their leader, Earl Browder, imprisoned for traveling under a false passport. At the same time, new anti-communist laws were enacted: the Voorhis Act, requiring the registration of agents of a foreign power (i.e., the CP); the Hatch Act, proscribing communists in government; and the Smith Act against teaching the principles of revolution. It was also during this time that Roosevelt bestowed extraordinary powers on the FBI to target domestic communism. That led to measures such as the creation of a custodial detention list — essentially a concentration camp scheme to round up communists if an emergency order was given. When the communists abandoned their anti-war position with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the repression abated — though hardly ended. It was a circumstance that would not last.
Dangerous Public Opinion
With the onset of the Cold War, the government undertook its most aggressive wave of anti-communist repression ever, imprisoning or holding under indictment dozens of the party’s top leaders by way of the Smith Act. This formal repression also fostered a social climate where communists became pariahs of the first order.
An indication of how deeply anti-communist sentiment penetrated the public consciousness could be seen in a 1954 poll by the Opinion Research Corporation. When asked if congressional committees hurt innocent people, 49 percent of the respondents said yes. Then, when asked if innocent people could be hurt in the process, 58 percent said, hurt or not, it was more important to uncover communists. The vast majority of Americans also said that communists should be stripped of citizenship, that the government should be allowed to tap their phones, and that it was a good idea “for people to report to the FBI any neighbors or acquaintances whom they suspected of being communists.” That this repression garnered such support — despite the modest actual influence of U.S. communists — was an example of how a negative consensus could be built through unrelenting demagoguery. In the fifties and to a lesser degree in the sixties, it was communism; in the eighties and nineties, it was terrorism, in the wake of 9/11 it was Islam, first Al Qaeda, then ISIS, and now again it is “the communists” and “the woke left.” The names may have changed, but the methodology has not.
A Vicious COINTELPRO
While the fever pitch of the Second Red Scare would lessen as the fifties gave way to the sixties, the pursuit of the CP did not. This era witnessed the initiation of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) aimed at the CPUSA, the first and most extensive in this notorious disruption effort.
One example can offer insight into the program’s myriad operations: the case of Aaron Libson, a closeted gay man and communist activist living in Philadelphia. In 1966, Libson was arrested by undercover police in a “tearoom” — a restroom in a public park used for gay encounters — on a sodomy charge. When the FBI, who knew Libson was a communist, learned of the arrest, they snapped into action with a COINTELPRO operation. As an FBI memorialized, the point was to “neutralize Libson with the party and embarrass the party generally.” To achieve this, they anonymously called James Dolsen, the head of the Philadelphia CP, as well as one of their press contacts “who has been used quite successfully in the Counterintelligence Program and has always protected the Bureau’s interests.”
Libson describes what followed:
“When I had the arrest, I pleaded nolo contendere — I do not wish to contend — on a Friday. The next day, Saturday, I woke up and got ready for work, and as I looked at the paper that morning, there was a small article saying, ‘Local Red arrested.’ I had a suicide plan ready just in case it came out, so I thought, OK, this is it and I carried out the plan. … I wasn’t going to do anything at my house where my family would find me, so I rented a room at the Arch Street YMCA. I’d packed some of the crystal stuff you clean toilets in some tin foil, and I swallowed that and laid down and waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. In the interim, I’d called a friend of mine. While I was waiting for something to happen with the poison, I got up and sat on the window ledge — the room was on the fifth floor. As I realized the poison wasn’t working.”
Fortunately, the friend stopped things from going further. For its part, the Bureau counted this as a victory. As the noted in a memo detailing various COINTELPRO operations, “After Libson entered a guilty plea in February 1967, the fact was published in a newspaper, Daniel Rubin, National Organizational Secretary, stated Libson was dropped from the CP.”
While COINTELPRO officially came to an end after being exposed in the early 1970s, the surveillance and attention to the CP did not. In 1978 Congress established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which allowed for the legal wiretapping of those the US considered foreign agents, which included the pro-Soviet, CPUSA. The Bureau also kept in place its informant Morris Childs, who was acting as CP General Secretary Gus Hall’s liaison with the Soviets — a paradoxical circumstance of the Bureau both facilitating the funding of the CP, something Child’s was responsible for, while also garnering precious intelligence — and then there was the FBI’s investigation of the Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador (CISPES) because of perceived communist infiltration. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the extraordinary attention to the CPUSA ended, if not the legal and extralegal measures against other perceived enemies.
Were all this a matter of the past, it would be bad enough, but this history has thrust itself into the present. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, used against communists and anarchists during the Palmer Raids of 1920, was leveled in 2025 against Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Khalil. Trump has talked about stripping immigrant citizens of naturalization; meanwhile, the MAGA shock troops have set their sights on the political opposition. Elise Stefanik, the MAGA congresswoman from New York, has called New York City’s mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a “raging antisemite communist.” The methodology behind this is hardly concealed. Trump, while running for president in the summer of 2024, made this clear: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country.”
While this effort has not been wholly successful, it is a significant problem that no small number of people are swayed by this. In that sense, knowing a little history can serve as a weapon.