Origins of the Red Scare

In the first part of his book "American Anti-Communism", M. J. Heale writes "the fraternal egalitarianism of the American republican heritage with its insistence that rights and opportunities were available to all, enabled collectivist doctrines to be repudiated as un-American." What Heale means by this is that the American society was built upon the idea of equality of man, which at the time meant white male landowners. These wealthy landowners would become the middle and …

…the growing fear Americans had of communism. Communism was viewed as a threat to who attained a high station in American society. The high society wanted to eliminate the radicals so they could maintain their class in life. At this time, the fear of communism in the late 1800s would lay the foundation for the fear and distrust of the Communists in the Soviet Union and the rest of the world nearly fifty years later.