The Origins of American Anticommunism, ca. 1860–1917

This chapter traces the origins of American anticommunism by focusing on the years between 1860 and 1917. It suggests that anticommunism was a response to the failure of US political institutions and traditions to resolve the fundamental challenges of the latter nineteenth century. Anticommunism became an effective and influential political doctrine and strategy woven into America's “countersubversive” tradition of politics, prosecuted by a blend of corporate, government, and social entities comprising powerful public-private or state-society partnerships. This chapter first provides an overview of capitalism and corruption in the Gilded Age before discussing how the combination of fear, resentment, and denial culminated in the birth and support of a doctrine that styled labor organization, industrial action, and unemployment relief as illegitimate and even subversive threats to American civilization. It also examines the political purposes of anticommunism, along with several incidents of national importance that associated political and industrial radicalism with labor organization, immigration, and communism. Finally, it describes organized labor at the close of the Gilded Age.