American society, in accord with its nature, wanted to extend tolerance to those whose political opinions were outside the mainstream. The United States articulated, after all, freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights.
But it soon became clear that this was no mere difference of opinion. Those who sympathized with the international communist conspiracy were not simply expressing a political point of view: they were terrorists.
The Communist Party in the United States (CPUSA) was not interested in the political process, nor was it engaged in attempting to persuade the voters about its ideology. Instead, it was engaged in espionage.
As part of the Soviet spy network, the CPUSA worked both to smuggle secrets out of the U.S. government and send them back to Moscow, and to infiltrate the ranks of advisors and appointees within the government and thereby nudge U.S. foreign policy away from the interests of ordinary American citizens and toward the interests of the USSR.
Soviet operatives worked their way into very sensitive positions in the federal government. Communists like Alger Hiss were advisors at the highest levels, meeting face-to-face with the president and shaping major diplomatic decisions.
Alger Hiss was a confidant to President Roosevelt. Under Hiss’s guidance, or misguidance, FDR allowed Stalin to ravage large parts of eastern Europe, and paved the way for Mao to bully Chiang Kai-shek out of China.
The CPUSA was even prepared for violence, and asserted in its written materials that it sought a “violent” revolution inside the United States.
Pro-Communists inside the United States were not merely people with alternative opinions. They were actively engaged in supporting Stalin’s murderous drive for world domination, as historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:
As the record further shows, Communists and fellow travelers on official rosters in case after case were agents of the Soviet Union, plighting their troth to Moscow and striving to promote the cause of the dictator Stalin. This is of course contrary to the notion that American Reds were simply idealistic do-gooders, perhaps a bit misguided but devoted to peace and social justice, and thus shouldn’t have been ousted from government jobs just because of their opinions. In countless instances, we know that domestic Communists in official posts were actively working on behalf of Russia, and thus were the minions of a hostile foreign power.
Stalin explicitly sought to overthrow the western-style democracies in Europe, South America, and North America. His effort to bring the world under totalitarian subjugation relied on various factors, one of which was an extensive Soviet espionage network inside the United States.
