Communism has occupied quite diverse and conflicting positions in modern American culture. In the 1930s, during the years of the non-sectarian Popular Front against fascism in the world Communist movement, the Communist Party in the United States contributed to the development of powerful organizing campaigns in favor of Social Security racial equality and industrial unionism. In the early years of the Great Depression, a number of prominent writers and intellectuals, including Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson, wrote favorably about communism, the American Communist movement and the Soviet Union. However, the Communist Party itself remained committed to a Leninist “militantminority” methodology of social change, and usually adhered in public to the “line” of Soviet foreign policy In the years just before the Second World War, the development of powerful moral critiques of Stalinism seriously began to complicate many intellectuals’ interest in and enthusiasm for the “Soviet Experiment.” Partly as a consequence of its close association with Soviet communism, American communism has been both favored and abhorred by advocates of economic equality the welfare state and labor unionism. Both the friends and enemies of civil rights and civil liberties have invoked anti-communism. Especially at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the American Communist Party was ritually denounced by members of the educational, religious, political and cultural establishments, and communists or anyone associated with communism as an indigenous social movement were often persecuted or denied employment. However, few American elites believed that the American Communist Party was ever a real threat to the security of American institutions. Instead, communism and communists often came to represent the racial, ethnic and even gendered “other” in the midst of conflicts over what constituted “Americanism” in American political discourse.

Following the Second World War, conservative politicians were able to connect communism with New Deal liberalism in the popular imagination by exploiting populist undercurrents of resentment against state intervention and “social experimentation.” The conviction of Alger Hiss, a former mid-level official in the Roosevelt administration, for perjury in a spy case (1950) allowed Republicans to associate the New Deal with the disloyalty or incompetence of liberal policy elites. Following the conviction and subsequent executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for atomic spying (1950–3), communism was linked more firmly than ever in the popular imagination with subversion, even though there is little evidence that either Hiss or the Rosenbergs seriously compromised American security. Large majorities of Americans came to believe that the Communist Party in the US should be outlawed and that communists should not be allowed to teach.

In the 1970s and 1980s, communism retained elements of its racial, class, ethnic and treasonous identifications for many Americans, and American politicians continued to more-or-less successfully portray world communism as America’s most dangerous external enemy. Following the end of the Cold War and the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, some astute critics even claimed to detect a loss of American national purpose.